Book Review

 The Booker prize longlist is out, with 13 books to be judged, whittled down to six by the 15th of September and then finally one by the end of October. Whichever book wins, it will be one that not everybody will like. You would think that Hilary Mantel is a shoe-in with the final of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. I have read it and it’s good. Not a word wasted with beautiful language, full of historical accuracy in all the right places. She won for the other two and it would seem cruel not to give it to her for the final piece of the puzzle. I hope this won’t stop people reading the others.

 I felt like that last year. I read the Testaments and just knew that Margret Attwood had to win the prize, so didn’t read any of the others. I only read Girl, Woman, Other (that shared the prize - we should have known we were heading into unprecedented  times) a few months ago. 

Authors need these prizes (not just for the money, although that helps) but to get us to buy and read their books. It gets their name known, so that publishers pay them something to stay at home and write the next one. The sad fact is that there is not enough time to read every book published.

There is also a ‘Not the Booker’ list by the Guardian, which has over 200 books on the longlist. The UK publishes over 180,000 books a year (obviously not all adult fiction). These numbers are quite overwhelming.  

Every book has taken hours of work, hours of doubt, hours of hunching over a computer/typewriter/notebook. To even get to the stage where someone thinks it os worth being published means that it’s pretty good.  

Yesterday, I read one of the books that is on both the longlists. I thought Such a Fun Age was a cracking story. It marched along and had complex characters and made me think. Thanks to Mrs Thain, my primary school teacher when I was 9, I feel a compulsion to write a review. I used to keep a little notebook but the Goodreads stepped up. I always think that every book deserves 5 stars in a public forum like that. It must help the author but I can hear my (slightly terrifying) school teacher saying, “You can’t like everything. Develop an opinion, girl.”  After I’ve left my review I like to see what other people thought of it.

I was expecting unanimous praise for Such a Fun Age. Lots of people were disappointed. They didn’t like the flawed characters. They wanted the heroine to be more of a hero. They wanted it to give them all the answers to the problem of race. They thought it was ‘just chic-lit’. For me, all these were the reasons why I liked the book. It was easy to read; about, mainly, women; couldn’t fix he problem of racism but observed it well; no character was perfect. We are so lucky that so many people are willing to sit and write for hours to give us so much choice. There are enough stories so that everyone can find at least one that speaks to them. 

Today the YouTube algorithm chose Yoga for Writers and ended with the aphorism, ‘every time I sit down to write my ideas flow out.’ It made me laugh out loud. Everyone knows ideas don’t flow. They clump and fall and get stuck and finally have to be rearranged.