would not should good

I HAVE NEVER BEEN A BIG FOLLOWER of the Man Booker Prize, according to some the most prestigious literary book award in the world, and the accompanying broo hoo about long lists and short lists of books. Pulitzer Prizes fall into the same category, but it is so expansive, with so many winners, it is even harder to get excited about them. Sort of like the Grammies to me now.

Now, if I saw that a book one the Booker it gave it a slight edge in my bookstore wonderings to actually pick it up and see if it was really better than the thousands of other books lying around next to it. I can’t remember if I have actually bought any of those books. Not sure if that is because I buy too many books or I never actually got sucked into them enough to buy them. Seriously good books require an effort that sometimes I am not willing to put in anymore. Well, not much anymore.

Looking the list of winners on Wikipedia (which I couldn’t find the Man Booker website), I only see one book I have read: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I only read that as part of my Rushdie phase, as I was looking for something to read after finishing The Satanic Verses. Both represent the pinnacle of Rushdie’s efforts as a novelist in my viewpoint, but enough of these distractions.

But as a bookstore owner I now take a different interest in all things bookish, although most of it is more mainstream than high brow examinations of the great novel. This lead to me to actually trying to start to follow and think about the books on the Man Booker Long List (13 books of goodness, aspiring to greatness). Of course, this week (yesterday in fact) the Short List was announced (6 better than good, but not quite greatness). The overal winner will be announced next month. When you search for one fo the books on Amazon, you can see how they are all tied together now, as the recommended books to go along with one of them is the rest of the Booker Long List.

Here is the Short List:
Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic)
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

I have not read any of the books on this list. We have one of the books from the list, Barry’s The Secret Scripture , which I found on Oprah’s book club web site. It shows how far out of the literary game I am, which is ok really. I can’t imagine people at work would put money on a book award, but American Football, now that is something to spend hours researching. However, like everything, you can bet on the Man Booker awards, as the bookie have made odds on the books.

Regardless of the possibility of making some money on knowing the winner, this is supposed to be about reading, so I am going to put some of these books on my reading list. At least I hope they will make it. I will start with Adiga’s The White Tiger, and see how it goes. I used to get all worked up about the Academy Awards, but at some point I lost interest after I noticed the awards seem to go to people for the wrong reasons and I started rooting against directors and not really evaluating the movies, so not sure I need another awards ceremony that I fail to read all the books for and simply root the one I read. I also might not be ready for a good novel yet, and need to stick to my genre fiction (science fiction, mystery, etc).