dovegreyreader scribbles

It's a winner

What a week for the internet connection to curl up its toes and die! But we are at one with the world again this morning it would seem and with BT on full stand by to sort out another collapse.
But double good news, my 100% record of never picking a Booker winner remains intact and I am delighted for Anne Enright and The Gathering. My early thoughts dragged back from the depths just to remind myself about a remarkable book which touched such a chord with me when I read it and that free copy, now a Booker Prize winner, still wending its way by land and sea to Imani in Canada.

Aha, here it is, this is bound to be it...the Booker Turkey.
Maliciously burnt hole in photo on the cover, big miserable Irish family, too many children to name, not enough clean clothes to go round, death, grief, the Catholic church, ah yes, some covert sexual abuse, good, good, all the makings of highly pretentious load of old...a winner in fact.
So I started The Gathering  by Anne Enright thinking I was going to hate it, no, why mess about, I was going to absolutely loath it.
Things got off to a very promising start in that case with the narrative keeping me at arm's length, fractionally out of the loop.
I couldn't quite grasp what was happening, what's this all about?
Veronica is one of twelve Hegarty children, a vast sprawling Dublin family, her mother actually what we'd call in the trade a para twelve but a gravida nineteen, so seven lost babies in amongst them all.Under those circumstances you can certainly forgive the poor woman her increasing state of confusion and for having her preferences amongst such an enormous brood.
I'm starting to melt a bit.
Veronica's brother Liam has committed suicide in grand Woolfian style but on Brighton seafront, stones in the pocket the lot and having arranged to identify the body and bring him back to Ireland there is the matter of the wake and the funeral to be endured.Those dispatch occasions often the only time along with the hatches and the matches when big families all get together to celebrate, commiserate or a bit of both.
By now I'm quite intrigued because somehow this book is different.
The more I read the more I was dragged in kicking and screaming and made to stay, word by word, line by line, page by page ...noooooo I want to hate this book...but the voice just kept on creeping up on me insistently until eventually Anne Enright conquered me with her writing.
OK Anne, you win...and this might justifiably even snatch the Victor Ludorum in this brave new Booker world and I wouldn't be disappointed.
I was at Veronica's side living and breathing every single moment with her. At one with her confusions and uncertainties, her thoughts, her repetitions her reactions.and above all her slow acceptance and assimilation of her life.
Life's every single sadness lies within these pages alongside the irritations, the griefs and the losses of a disparate family down through the generations and Veronica seems to have soaked up more than her fair share. But believe me when I tell you, you can trust Anne Enright to avoid all the usual traps and pitfalls ready and waiting in miserable old Ireland and only one mention of Irish dancing that I can recall and not a whisper of that Flatley chap.
 As the wake, liberally laced with alcohol, gathers momentum
"something has happened to this family, the knot has come loose"
and gradually the ties of the years unbind and the truths start to work their way to the surface.
Like Liam
"because the place Liam worked best was under your skin"
so too does Anne Enright with her half-glimpses of a transitory moment often caught at a glance in Veronica's less than assured childhood memory,
"I was eight or nine but I'm not sure if it really did happen".
Passing thoughts sheer off in all directions, barely touching but often of deep significance in the grand scheme of things.
I love chapters which start with lines like
"I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass once".
Yes, I fell into step with the pulse and beat of this book very quickly, it is indeed from a different drum and I don't think everyone will surrender to it as I have, but to Anne Enright's eternal credit if I'd had the time I would have turned right back to the beginning and read it all over again.
It's firmly on my shortlist and if it doesn't make the real one then I shall be the one keening and lamenting quietly in the corner.

Bookerthon 2007 - The dgr Booker winner is ...

After much anguished deliberation with myself I've settled on Darkmans by Nicola Barker and my thoughts on the book are here for anyone who is interested.
It's a fabulously written novel of huge scope, readable, funny, sad, strange verging on weird; ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives in suburban Britain in the very extraordinary surroundings of the 21st century.Nicola Barker's wondrously perceptive vision spots and records the everyday that most of us would miss in the blink of an eye.
A novel of our time that deserves recognition.
Of course that's only what I think and this may all be the kiss of death on a brilliant book because I've never chosen a Booker winner yet, but could my luck be changing?

The Endsleigh Booker

It's here at last and how appropriate that the Endsleigh Salon reading group chose The Booker as their theme for last Tuesday evening.
The remit was vast, any book that has been nominated, long-listed or short-listed since the beginning.
So in the beginning there was The Booker and we had a good selection of books to talk around.
I took along Animal's People by Indra Sinha because in between dashing in from work, eating a roast dinner which Bookhound had lovingly prepared and dashing out again I opened my e mails.There was an invite to the Simon & Schuster Booker Prize party for Indra Sinha to be held at The Groucho Club this very evening.I suddenly felt exceedingly well disposed towards this book.
Please note that I am flogging myself to death at the front today so I am not dressed to the nines and en route to the Groucho for a knees up, but I do wish Indra Sinha and his publishers the very best of luck this evening.
There was good honest debate about Possession by A.S.Byatt and I could only talk to the first 100 pages of that because I had a complete Possession failure back along (as we says in Devon).Interestingly it had been read by several and with apologies to ASB it got the thumbs down from all of them.
Kazuo Ishiguro had a good airing, in particular When We Were Orphans and Kazuo got a general stamp of all-round good-egg approval as we debated several of his books and all promised to read more.We all as of one recalled that our town (Tavistock) and our famous shop ( Creber's) both get a mention in The Remains of the Day.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel received a mixed welcome, love or loath, dreamy eyed or narrow slits but it certainly drew plenty of debate...not from me beyond the recall of plagiarism allegations because I haven't read it and by this time I was beginning to think some Rennies might be handy because I really had bolted that dinner.
The Orchard on Fire by Sheena McKay had been read and enjoyed recently by one of our number and several of us remembered reading this one when it first came out, but yet again I wasn't much use because I couldn't conjure up a single thing about it, but it was 1997 and the first year of my OU degree so I claim exemption.
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah caught several of us on the hop but not the other several who had studied it for a degree course. I had never heard of it but it was highly praised as a good and unusual read by the several.
Lastly I must apologize to anyone who was staying at Hotel Endsleigh last Tuesday night because we got completely carried away with our discussions of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and were probably all talking a bit loudly over each other about topics we perhaps don't usually discuss quite so animatedly in public.If we receive an eviction notice then I will hold Ian McEwan personally responsible and he will have to come down and sort things out and explain that we were discussing the subject matter and certain events in his book and it was nothing more suggestive than that.
It was only when a member of staff put their head round the door and asked pointedly if there was anything we needed that we suddenly realised which phrases may have perhaps isolated themselves from the main conversation and floated off into the lounge where the guests were quietly sipping their drinks.
Oh dear, and those who had read it didn't think On Chesil Beach was a Booker winner either.
And where's my virtual money for the Booker Prize 2007? Well I'll let you know later.

Four out of six.

Four out of six not bad, and I'm not even dreadfully disappointed by the inclusions at the expense of my choices.
In the end I was having a huge three-way argument with myself  over Docx-Eng-McEwan and finally Docx won on sheer scope and control.But we love less is more here so no complaints and congratulations to Mohsin Hamid too.
But all that aside I'm truly, madly, deeply and a bit wildly excited for Nicola Barker, Anne Enright, Lloyd Jones and Indra Sinha in particular because I loved each of those books with a passion and knew instantly that they would be on my shortlist.
So the final decision on October 16th will be an unusual one for me, possibly a first, because there's nothing on this shortlist that would have me groaning if it won.John Sutherland's timely and perceptive piece in The Independent last weekend (thanks to Kirsty for the heads up) finally resolving any lingering and frankly misplaced prejudices I may have been harbouring about one book in particular.
So at last we can put The Booker Prize to bed for a few weeks and read something else and I have some real treats in store.

The Bookerthon 2007 longlist finishing line.

There is a very interesting analogy on the blog of Howard Davies, the Chair of this year's Booker Prize judges. He is discussing the final meeting where the long list choices were made

"The atmosphere in the judging room was somewhere between a book club and a maternity ward. What could be more agreeable than a freeform discussion of 110 novels, when you know that everyone else in the room has read them all and - even better - is obliged to display at least a polite interest in your exciting views? The only fly in the conversational ointment is that you are under the cosh to deliver 13 favourites at the end of it all.

Around five o'clock we gave birth, with Ion Trewin as an unlikely bearded midwife"

Well you know what's coming next don't you? How useful is that because I can pick up Howard's theme and run with it.
For anyone who doesn't know this, here in the UK once a baby has been born and the midwife has nurtured them along for about ten days she will ring the health visitor (me) and hand the care of the family over onto that caseload where they stay until they are five years old and off to school.
Now I'd prefer not have thirteen newborns handed over in one go and I'll admit I'd probably do a double take if the midwife was bearded down here in Devon, but if the Booker Prize demands such prolific multiple birthing then who am I to argue?
So what to make of this year's longlist?
Well I've loved it and I've relished the reading challenge. I've grown very fond of this manageable row of books in front of me on my desk. Arguments and cynicism rage about the standard and predictable range of the books with their token gestures towards all corners of life, but as a representative selection of what's out there, and some of it less than obvious, perhaps this list ranks as the one that has spawned a new breed of Booker book.
New breed? Well they are all readable for a start, except that memorable one for me and I think I'm probably off A.N.Wilson's Christmas card list (but I don't think I was ever on it) You wouldn't be disappointed to find yourself stuck on a long train journey with these, in fact several make it worth going on one specially so that you could read them cover to cover.
Some have moved me, some have challenged, some have enthralled and some have made me smile but the moment has come for my shortlist, which is probably more of a wishlist, because I'm well aware that the judges may have an entirely different remit to mine.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
Self Help by Edward Docx
The Gathering by Anne Enright
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Animal's People by Indra Sinha

I think it's interesting that John Self over at Asylum and I have come up with almost identical lists.I doubt either of us expected that and many thanks to John for a great joint reading blogventure. Clicking on the titles will take you to my reviews, clicking on the author will take you to John's.
The Gathering by Anne Enright might be an acquired taste for many (but it was spot on for me the day I picked it up) but I can heartily recommend all of these as good, thought-provoking, enjoyable reads, many with hidden depths but not so hidden that you feel like the billy-no-mates who hasn't been invited to the party.
So we await the judges shortlist with bated breath later today.
As for my winner?
Oh no, if I told you that I'd have to kill you, makes you want to slap people doesn't it?
I shall declare on the day and these and a few more thoughts about  Bookerthon 2007 from dgr on The Bookseller website here.

Bookerthon 2007 : Consolation by Michael Redhill

The very final Bookerthon 2007 review and though you will read this as one post I'm writing it in two instalments as the reading progresses with Consolation by Michael Redhill.A nice dinky bag-sized hard back, floppy pages, good start.
I hear from several sources that this is a book of two halves, gets off to a great shortlist start but slows down about halfway through and then possibly loses its momentum.
Perhaps I'll see this book differently?
Perhaps the slowing down will be a nice rest for me in the middle?
Two narratives are alternating through the book.
The 1990's and David Hollis, fighting a debilitating illness is researching a theory that precious and historic information about Toronto is buried under a prospective building site about to be submerged in concrete. All this rather then end his life "rotting in a mechanical god-damned bed".
The mid 1850's and Jem Hallam, an apothecary recently emigrated alone from the UK and struggling to make his family's fortunes in this fledgling and upcoming Canadian city, "he thought perhaps he could dream his life into existence by writing it down".
I am anxiously following both stories, one of those books that informs you early on about outcomes and you eat your way through the pages to try and piece it all together and just see how it all happened.
Well yes, this certainly felt like a book of two halves and though I wasn't disappointed by the second half the pace certainly slowed as all the explanations for the first half were played out towards a twist that didn't have the impact with me that it should have done, I know why and perhaps you will spot it too when you read this one.
I've never been to Canada, let alone Toronto but, as someone mentioned here in comments, if this is your city then this is your book and will be a must read.Toronto becomes the central character with its muffled voice.

" There is a vast part of this city with mouths buried in it...Mouths capable of speaking to us. But we stop them up with concrete and build over them and whatever it is they wanted to say gets whispered down empty alleys and turned into wind. People need to be given a reason to listen"

That said, the themes translated well for people like me who have only ever done Canada from our armchairs.I am a huge fan of CanLit.
Consolation a book for me about common themes, helplessness and ultimately disappointments, loneliness and exile and probably a whole lot of meaning to be extracted from the emphasis on the photographic image and its permanence, capturing of the essence of the moment and preserving what is so quickly lost. A good review by a Torontonian here and also an interesting interview with the author.
A book worthy of the attention that Booker longlisting offers and a good read but will it fill one of the last few places on my shortlist? Well that's for me to know and you to guess and I HATE it when people say that to me.
All will be revealed tomorrow.

Reality check

It's been strange getting back to the harsh realities of my caseload after a week's bookish annual leave and all the excitement that goes with dipping the occasional toe in the world of publishing.
I wrote a piece for The Bookseller Magazine about why I blog which you can find here. Fortunately I don't work in an environment that reads The Bookseller online or I suspect I would have been in for a fair old bit of leg-pulling about this byline,
"A Devon-based health visitor has become one of the most influential literary figures in the blogosphere, courted by publishers and respected by readers"
It takes a lot to impress the world of medicine and probably only a cure for MRSA will do the trick and I'm nowhere near that at the moment.
There didn't seem to be a great reception committee waiting to strew my path with flowers or pat me on the back as I walked into the surgery nor were they cheering "well done good and faithful health visitor." It was a Monday morning and those are notoriously fraught, so it was swiftly back to the world of constipated babies, tantruming toddlers and tired and weary parents and there's nothing like it all for a reality check.
But keep an eye out because The Bookseller are going to be linking to the dgr Bookerthon reviews over the next few days which surely has to be almost the next best thing to discovering a cure for MRSA?

Bookerthon 2007 - Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

Almost at the finishing line on the Bookerthon and Gifted by Nikita Lalwani has been the book that has held up to the very worst sort of reading attention here at dgr scribbles especially as the cover doesn't blend with our decor at all. Taken to work and read for half an hour over lunch in my car, a bit more here and there, a longer read and few more snippets on a train and then the final push for the last page.
To finish a book uninterrupted is one of life's luxuries and if I know it's unlikely to happen I'll put it down five pages from the end and come back to it rather than spoil that moment. I suspect most writers sweat blood over their beginnings and their endings and I like to take my time and appreciate their efforts.
So how does all this relate to Gifted?
Well I suspect that like me this stop-start approach is how many people have to read and so a book that will stand up to this rigorous testing has to be good.This one is and deserving of the Booker longlist spotlight.Pick it up after a gap and you are immediately back in the flow.
Poor Rumi Vasi is a gifted child, a genius at maths born into an Indian family living in Cardiff .Feeling they have much to prove, her parents start her off young on the fateful course that will catapult her into Oxford at the age of fifteen.Numbers become Rumi's way of life and everything else is sacrificed in their relentless path.
It has to implode sooner or later and the blurb tells you as much.
It is like waiting for a road accident on an icy day, you just know it's going to happen, the question is when and how. Not only that but how will Nikita Lalwani handle the obvious when it does happen making it interesting enough to read?
Well to my mind she handles it very well. I was suddenly racing towards the end of Gifted completely drawn into the family's pain as everything unravelled and willing this to happen or that to happen and then settling for Nikita Lalwani's ending with a degree of relief.
Ever since I read The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig (Pushkin Press) and The Miniature Man by r.muir (Snowbooks) any book that blends some of the plot around a game of chess gets my attention.I always think it's neat and I love shaping up the analogies, bishop taken out = spot the religious debate, pawn strikes = look out for the power of the ordinary man, queen under threat = take cover there's trouble brewing.
Ultimately a sad book and a reflection of so much that can go so wrong with very clever children all bound up in the complexities of cross-cultural differences and the need to excel as a means of proving worth.
Gifted academically doesn't equate with gifted emotionally.
At an emotional level these children develop at just the same rate as everyone else, often with far greater potential to be disturbed because they are thrust into peer groups beyond their chronological age.
It all needs very careful management and Nikita Lalwani has flagged it all up very astutely in this book.
So will it make my shortlist? Well guess what?
I couldn't possibly comment and I get really annoyed when people say that too.
Not long to go now.

Bookerthon 2007 - Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Flying in the face of the joys of concise reviewing, you'd better go and make a cup of tea and sit down comfortably because today the decks must be cleared for Darkmans by Nicola Barker.The book that rapidly compromises the circulation to your feet if it rests on your lap, places your wrists at high risk of a bout of tenosynovitis if you hold it up.
Either you delete all pre-conceptions about what a novel should be and go for total-immersion reading, expect fictional expectations to be subverted and assumptions to be challenged, or Darkmans may remain an unreadable mystery.
A huge glimpse of a very small slice of life in Ashford in Kent, a town transformed by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel and for many the beginning of the end of our life as an impenetrable island.
I had to forge ahead, often in a state of complete unknowing, but knew I was reading as truer representation of life both on and off the page as it's possible to find, admittedly with a few strange diversions, but as cinematic as fiction can be.
Real life isn't always explained in the next paragraph and neither is Darkmans, you may have to wait several chapters and this book about far more than it's possible to cover in one post, so I'll focus on it as the ultimate people-watching experience.I suspect I was helped here by the day-job which is exactly that (well, and just a bit more) and I knew that for sure when I read about Dina,

" The Dina Broad Experience, had a technical staff numbering well over a dozen (the doctor, the social worker, the neighbour, the policeman)"...she must have had a health visitor when Kelly was born.

On the surface, people we may judge as stereotypes living life out there on the margins, except to me that always feels so patronising and I suspect Nicola Barker feels the same.
Who's to say where the margins begin and end and who decides anyway?
Rounded, often funny, often sad yet ultimately warm caring people who I felt I recognised.Yes even the cowboy builder Harvey Broad with his three mobile phones kept nestling in his

"builder's buddy, a kind of construction worker's gun holster...this is a prototype, Guv. Have a guess at what kinda hide that is...Pig?! Pull the other one! That's Buffalo, mate. Straight up"

As I have been reading  Darkmans the thought struck me early on that this could be a Dickens of a book.
I'm not saying Nicola Barker is the latest Charles Dickens, because actually I don't want to start some sort of 19th versus 21st century internecine writing conflagration, and though her canvas is as broad her role of players is much more limited, but I held onto one thought and it was sustained from start to finish.
Any reader who chances upon Darkmans in a hundred years time will read it much as we may read Dickens, for a fictional snapshot of  a section of society living in a particular time and place under particular circumstances.
Just as we can tut and tsk over so much of Dickens and say
"My weren't things terrible then?"
"Thank goodness we no longer send children up chimneys"
" At least living conditions have improved"
I suspect anyone who reads Darkmans in a hundred years time may say very similar things
"My weren't things terrible then"
"Thank goodness we no longer have a drug problem"
"At least living conditions have improved"

But Charles Dickens often offered mitigation for some of his trickiest characters, making judgemental assumptions much more difficult and Nicola Barker does likewise. It may often be just the merest hint but the message for me was powerful; laugh with me but please don't laugh at me because I have as much right to be here as you do and there are very real reasons for me being me.
As I travelled back from London on the late evening train last week, I was kept nicely awake by a fascinating book I had been very kindly given by Ernest Hecht at Souvenir Press, The Moral Imagination by Gertrude Himmelfarb, coincidentally a very recent review of it here. It's an interesting collection of essays on the moral imagination in literature and, though it's complex territory to grasp as you plod through Reading, Newbury, Pewsey, Taunton, Tiverton and all stations west at 11pm, it started to crystallise many of my embryonic thoughts on Darkmans.
On Dickens Gertrude Himmelfarb concludes

"He brought the poor into the forefront of the culture, and thus into the forefront of the consciousness and the conscience of his own generation and of generations to come - not as an abstract class but as notable individuals."

Substitute that loaded word "poor" and add something of your own choosing because all the characters in Darkmans are rich in many other ways but the gist is the same.

It is Peta the Ashford forger who summed up the cynicism of our Darkmans times for me

"the truth is...that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge - for our own, sick reasons - into a convenient design. Everything is arbitary...The truth is simply an idea. a structure which we employ - in very small doses - to render life bearable."

And Elen the podiatrist who sums up the simple dilemma for many,

"I couldn't play along because I didn't know what the rules were."

For me Darkmans checks in as the ultimate latter-day social novel, reflecting like a multi-faceted crystal so many aspects of people's lives today and I suspect it's another of those love-hate books on the Booker longlist.
I'm a fully paid-up member of The Loved Every Word Club, all 838 pages, and it's more Nicola Barker for me for sure.
So is it on my shortlist?
In the immortal words of the wonderful Kelly Broad, "Ding-bloomin' - dong!" you bet it is!

Another Darkmans update

Just fifty pages to go on my final read of this year's Bookerthon and it's half killed me but I've put Darkmans down to have a ponder.
Firstly, to digest just why this has been such an amazing read for me, and secondly to see if I can figure out how Nicola Barker is going to wind it all up.Then I'll pick it up again and savour those last pages and may well feel bereft when I reach p838.
The book is covered in pencilled thoughts because so much has struck me as unusual as I've read, prepare for a Darkmans love-in here on Wednesday.

Bookerthon 2007 : Winnie and Wolf by A.N.Wilson

Well it had to happen and finally it has so I'm going to write this and then do a runner from the county for the day.
I think I may have to hold my hands up and admit to my first Booker refusal of the 2007 season, four faults and no plans to go back and try to jump this fence again unless it makes the shortlist.Susan Hill has big sponduliks resting on this one to win so make what you will of all that. I have a 100% unbroken record stretching back several years of spotting the winner in one of two ways

• the book I like the least of any I read (The Sea - John Banville)
• the last remaining book that I haven't had time to read (The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai)

I have flogged and struggled and strained pitifully with every sinew to like this book, to tune into it, to bond with it and I'm floundering so much I'm going to stop.
There will therefore be no decent review of Winnie and Wolf by A.N.Wilson at this stage of the bookerthon.
On that basis I really should draw a line here but this is the Booker so I will explain why I have failed because it's mea culpa maxima. (maximus? Perhaps my Latin teacher is looking on and tsk-ing?)
If I had loved opera I might have had a route into enjoying this book because the eighty or so pages I have read thus far are chock-full of  operatic facts and historical detail about Mr and Mrs Wagner, Siegfried's penchant for little boys, Bayreuth and all things Wotan plus Mrs Wagner's love for Mr Hitler. There are names dropped all over the place which will have all the operatic divas salivating but they are wasted on the likes of me.
So much so that I was beginning to wonder whether I was reading fiction or non-fiction.
But this is a novel after all, it says so on the cover and I just couldn't touch base with the story, it completely eluded me, concealed in this mass of operaticalia.When it's not your subject research can tend to rest on the book like a ton of bricks and though I adore a bit of well-researched fiction, unless it sits lightly on the whole I start to feel as if I'm sitting in a lecture.
Hands up, I would never go to a lecture on opera so this book was going to have to work overtime.
With apologies to all the zillions of opera lovers out there but I am the philistine who hates it.Opera grates in a part of my brain that I can't quite locate.Clearly I am lacking the Operatic Appreciation Lobe, the singing does not wash over me in a flood of emotion reducing me to tears.
Well actually it does reduce me to tears because to my ignorant ear it sounds like caterwauling and if it comes on the radio I switch it off fast, it drives me nuts.That's how bad it is...oh heck I can see the garments being rendered to shreds out there.
I'll quickly change the subject.
Hitler.
Actually nor would I go to a lecture on Hitler.
I must admit I am not overly interested in the life and flatulence of Hitler and by all accounts he really was full of hot air, manifesting itself not only as lengthy speeches but also as a voluminous wind problem.
A.N.Wilson suggests that Hitler could apparently trumpet with enough force to start an avalanche, the motto here being surely never go off piste with the Fuhrer?
Winifred Wagner does exactly this and though I'm interested, I'm not interested enough.
If Susan says there's a fine novel in here then sure as eggs are eggs there is, but suddenly this whole book made me feel depressed and miserable, not an ounce of enjoyment.
That said, I have read plenty of other fiction on subjects I might know little about or even have little interest in but I emerge feeling as if whole new reading trails have opened up before me.Many books have captured my imagination and run with it, not so Winnie and Wolf yet.
If it makes the shortlist I might throw myself at it again.
So with humble apologies, other than wondering whether Hitler was eating a touch too much fibre or swallowing a great deal of air as he spoke and whether Winifred had recourse to a mask (A.N.Wilson supplies sufficient detail that would make one hope so), there is nothing I really want to follow through on this one.

Bookerthon 2007 - Animal's People by Indra Sinha

I've had to wait several days before I could gather my thoughts on my latest Bookerthon read because it was one of the most unusual books I've read in many a long year and I loved it.
How strange is all this?
Book after Booker book I'm suggesting is good and readable,original and worth the money.It genuinely feels as if new life is being slowly breathed into this forty year old event and the Booker Dozen longlist a masterstroke of an idea.Suddenly we've lost the great sprawling disparate lists of old to be replaced by a concentrated nucleus of carefully chosen books that it is entirely possible to read before the shortlist is announced if you give up sleeping and eating and don't go to work.
Most of us have had to do all of those as well so it's been a bit tight here but I have loved almost every minute so far though I do have a failure to report later this week.
So Animal's People by Indra Sinha, what to make of it?
Written in a strange combination of pidgin and dialect (and that will have the linguists out there shuddering, sorry) but one that I grasped easily and in that The Colour Purple way suddenly you are deeply into the life and world of the book in double quick time.
Set in India and narrated by a man called Animal who has been orphaned following a catastrophic chemical leak from a nearby American factory.His spine has melted and he walks on all-fours and it is from this, the lowest level that the entire story is told,

"This story has been locked up in me, its struggling to be, I can feel it coming, words want to fly out from between my teeth like a flock of birds making a break for it"

As Ellie, a young American doctor arrives in Khaufpur to help the long-suffering victims way after the event and many years into a protracted legal battle, suspicions are rife amongst the locals.They are desperately in need of medical help but have reached the point where they trust no one from Amrika, they may as well all be from the chemical Kampani, and so the call to boycott Ellie's hospital is initially a complete success.
Oral storytelling at its powerful best and presented as a transcript of twenty-two tapes recorded by Animal, his voice is one that you grow to love. Despite his seemingly unsavoury and undesirable habits he is instinctive and perceptive with a transparent honesty that leads you to trust his word and his judgement on everything.

"I don't know if you are a man or a woman. I'm thinking the things I'm telling you are not suited to a woman's ears, but if a person leaves things unsaid so as to avoid looking bad, it's a lie. I have sworn not to lie to you.If you feel embarrassed throw down the book in which these words are printed. Carry on reading, there's worse to come"

This in the middle of the night as Animal is perched half way up a mango tree spying on Ellie through her bedroom window.
Countless memorable moments in Animal's People, one as Animal explains to Ellie,

"What really disgusts me is that we people seem so wretched to you outsiders that you look at us with that so-soft expression, speak to us with that so-pious tone in your voice...people like you are fascinated by places like this. It's written all over you, all you folk from Amrika...jarnaliss, filmwallass, photographass, anthrapologiss"

Indra Sinha has taken an unusual perspective on an event which seems likely to be a fictional account of the Union Carbide-Bhopal tragedy of 1984 and now as I read about that anew, I'm deeply shocked.
More so than I remember being first time around, possibly because I was in mid three-babies-in-four-years production.Those times either make you hyper-sensitive to potential disaster or you go down the self-preservation route, shut yourself off from all external traumas and focus on your babies.I suspect I was having enough trouble staying awake on a daily basis, let alone coping with the news, so this book has been a startling reminder.
So much to reflect on with a book like this, the innate respect we accord one human being to another coming out top of my list and countless moments of tragedy and sadness all mixed in with Animal's humour.But time and again he hits the bull's eye, straight to the core, the fundamental truth in any given situation.
This as he and Ellie discuss the wearing of a watch,

"Now o'clock, always now o'clock.In the Kingdom of the Poor, time doesn't exist."

Animal's People absolutely does make my shortlist with just a few places left and four books to go.

Darkmans update

I'm in the relentless grip of Darkmans by Nicola Barker today, the book I had anticipated as the terrible uphill climb on the Booker long list, and there's absolutely no chance of me putting it down.My training has paid off, I'm not even the slightest bit weary with this one.
This the book that the literary world is finding it really tough to diagnose.
I'm seeing it like a modern day version of one of those vast Victorian canvases, The Railway Station or Derby Day, crowded with ordinary people living seemingly ordinary lives, but when you listen to anyone telling the narrative of their life (as I do about twenty times a day) you realise that no life is ordinary.
Everyone's story is their own and they are all unique and fascinating.
So here's Darkmans, a Frith painting but with a twenty-first century twist.
Do you remember those school field trips? Geography, Biology, off you'd all go with your metal coat hangers extended into a square. Then you had to throw it and analyse the contents of the square it created as it landed. OK so occasionally we'd re-launch to try and get a more interesting looking bit of grass, or beach or forest floor.
Well, so far I'm thinking Nicola Barker has tossed a coat hanger into the middle of Ashford, Kent and she is giving me the most extraordinary account of the ordinary lives she has captured in her square, and so far I'm completely in her thrall.
I'm getting the strangest feeling that this is a really important book.
Isn't this what Charles Dickens did?
Much more soon.

And the winner is...

Right, we've had the first draw for those odd twins, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald.
With not a cat in sight and  Bookhound off evening fishing and me sitting here on my own thinking the National Watchdog for Fair Draws might be ajudicating from afar, I had to grab the Gamekeeper as he flew in the door and out again to go ...I'll spare you the details, but doing what Gamekeepers do, suffice to say.
So the winner is
Another draw tomorrow for The Gathering by Anne Enright and just so the book won't be lonely I'm going to twin it with another favourite Penelope Fitzgerald novel.

Bookerthon 2007 - The Gathering by Anne Enright and another free book prize draw.

Aha, here it is, this is bound to be it...the Booker Turkey.
Maliciously burnt hole in photo on the cover, big miserable Irish family, too many children to name, not enough clean clothes to go round, death, grief, the Catholic church, ah yes, some covert sexual abuse, good, good, all the makings of highly pretentious load of old...a winner in fact.
So I started The Gathering  by Anne Enright thinking I was going to hate it, no, why mess about, I was going to absolutely loath it.
Things got off to a very promising start in that case with the narrative keeping me at arm's length, fractionally out of the loop.
I couldn't quite grasp what was happening, what's this all about?
Veronica is one of twelve Hegarty children, a vast sprawling Dublin family, her mother actually what we'd call in the trade a para twelve but a gravida nineteen, so seven lost babies in amongst them all.Under those circumstances you can certainly forgive the poor woman her increasing state of confusion and for having her preferences amongst such an enormous brood.
I'm starting to melt a bit.
Veronica's brother Liam has committed suicide in grand Woolfian style but on Brighton seafront, stones in the pocket the lot and having arranged to identify the body and bring him back to Ireland there is the matter of the wake and the funeral to be endured.Those dispatch occasions often the only time along with the hatches and the matches when big families all get together to celebrate, commiserate or a bit of both.
By now I'm quite intrigued because somehow this book is different.
The more I read the more I was dragged in kicking and screaming and made to stay, word by word, line by line, page by page ...noooooo I want to hate this book...but the voice just kept on creeping up on me insistently until eventually Anne Enright conquered me with her writing.
OK Anne, you win...and this might justifiably even snatch the Victor Ludorum in this brave new Booker world and I wouldn't be disappointed.
I was at Veronica's side living and breathing every single moment with her. At one with her confusions and uncertainties, her thoughts, her repetitions her reactions.and above all her slow acceptance and assimilation of her life.
Life's every single sadness lies within these pages alongside the irritations, the griefs and the losses of a disparate family down through the generations and Veronica seems to have soaked up more than her fair share. But believe me when I tell you, you can trust Anne Enright to avoid all the usual traps and pitfalls ready and waiting in miserable old Ireland and only one mention of Irish dancing that I can recall and not a whisper of that Flatley chap.
 As the wake, liberally laced with alcohol, gathers momentum
"something has happened to this family, the knot has come loose"
and gradually the ties of the years unbind and the truths start to work their way to the surface.
Like Liam
"because the place Liam worked best was under your skin"
so too does Anne Enright with her half-glimpses of a transitory moment often caught at a glance in Veronica's less than assured childhood memory,
"I was eight or nine but I'm not sure if it really did happen".
Passing thoughts sheer off in all directions, barely touching but often of deep significance in the grand scheme of things.
I love chapters which start with lines like
"I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass once".
Yes, I fell into step with the pulse and beat of this book very quickly, it is indeed from a different drum and I don't think everyone will surrender to it as I have, but to Anne Enright's eternal credit if I'd had the time I would have turned right back to the beginning and read it all over again.
It's firmly on my shortlist and if it doesn't make the real one then I shall be the one keening and lamenting quietly in the corner.
Even better you lucky, lucky people, as if I haven't been kind enough to you already this week and as a reward for reading this post to the very end, here's another one that I have in duplicate, so names in comments again for a lovely free copy of The Gathering.

Bookerthon 2007 - On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan & free books prize draw

I've just finished On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and I quite enjoyed it, in fact no, I really quite enjoyed it.
On reflection I think it's the plethora of in-depth reviews that have put me off. That and opening it randomly in a bookshop and catching one or two lines completely out of context and being put right off my lunch.
I hardly need to do any plot detail because it's been covered everywhere but it's 1962 and Florence and Edward settle down uncomfortably to their post-wedding meal and the first evening of their honeymoon.

" Their courtship had been a pavane, a stately unfolding, bound by protocols never agreed or voiced, but generally observed....The language and practice of therapy, the currency of feelings diligently shared, mutually analysed, were not yet in general circulation."

Enough said, ignorance is not bliss and things go hopelessly wrong and I'll say no more than that because despite reading countless reviews I was as quietly stunned as anyone else by the outcome.
It's a short novel and debate about novel versus novella and Booker eligibility seems to have quietened down in the face of a good read that easily matches previous Booker prize winners for word count.
There is however a subtle difference for me at least.
When you turn over the final and 139th page of Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore (the winner in 1979) you feel as if you've just read a 500 page book and I don't even think it's her best one.Offshore could easily have been a much longer book but Penelope Fitzgerald always knew exactly what to leave out so that her reader has to do the work, use their imagination, work a bit harder.
Somehow when I turned the 166th page of On Chesil Beach I felt as if I'd only read 166 pages.
There was absolutely not another word Ian McEwan had to say, the subject had been turned inside out, described in meticulous detail and analysed down to the very last...well to the very last I don't know what really, but no imagination was required, all this reader's work had been done.
It's not a criticism, just a very subjective observation and I can't describe it any better than that I'm afraid.
Like The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies, On Chesil Beach yet another gentle book that masks the underlying ferment of an age on the cusp of change and here a world that was finally about to shake off the years of post-war doldrums and twist its way into the swinging sixties.Ian McEwan peppers the narrative with contemporaneous cultural details grounding it firmly in its time.

"This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure."

Certainly the range of Booker longlisters this year covering a broad spectrum of twentieth century happenings.
No decision about whether it makes my shortlist yet though I'm hedging towards doubtful.
But good news, thanks to the vagaries of the rural Devon postal delivery system the replacement copy sent  arrived the day after the original parcel finally turned up. I am On Chesil Beach-ed up to my eyebrows, would anyone anywhere in the whole world like the spare copy?
To make it fair, names in comments through to midnight and we'll have a mini dgr Booker prize draw later and because I love you all so much I'm going to twin it with a copy of Offshore and the winner can decide for themselves.
And as if that wasn't enough excitement for one week, there was another Booker longlist duplicate in the same parcel, so another free book prize draw tomorrow.

Bookerthon 2007 reprise : Part Two

As you can see the complex molecular structure of Listeria Bibliophilogenes is mutating slowly, just a couple of books proving tricky to replicate. (Consolation where art thou?) The reading is constantly in progress and I'm pacing myself because  I want to enjoy all these books as much as I enjoy every other one I read.
Currently I have Animal's People by Indra Sinha well underway and having quickly settled into the style of writing and the language I am welded to it. I feel sure I will be saying good shortlisty things about this one.
I read On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan as slowly as I possibly could but it was done over a long afternoon, a pot of tea and one snooze in the middle and I'm not saying another word until tomorrow.
Look out for an On Chesil Beach book giveaway tomorrow too. I've ended up with one emergency borrowed copy and, like buses, two more in quick succession as missing parcels caught up with replacements.
I'll be sending one off into the blogosphere.
Halfway through The Gathering by Anne Enright and I am quietly mesmerised by this book.The narrative voice is slowly creeping into my sub-conscious and I'm finding that Anne Enright's writing makes for strangely compelling reading.I think this could perhaps, just might possibly be the slow-burning dark horse of an outsider that creeps up on the inside lane when no one else is watching.
John Self over at Asylum suggests this is a book that will divide opinion much as Ali Smith and John Banville have in previous years (better add in Nicola Barker)
Interesting because I fell foul of both of those. I'm all for giving Ali Smith another go, indeed I know I must, but sadly John Banville and The Sea have had their chips here.

Bookerthon 2007 reprise : Part One The Darkmans Debate.

Two dgr Bookerthon updates on the blog today, expect the next at about 10 am.
Caught short by the longlist?
Eye-catching headline in the Telegraph this weekend who I read elsewhere owned up to being caught with their jackets off over this year's list. To make amends they have done a quick round up of their own and published brief reviews of six of the seven books they hadn't yet featured and a slightly longer one that was probably in the pipeline.
Interestingly four of them were ones that we in the land of the book blog had already found and savoured.
If only they'd asked us because I would humbly suggest that these read as very hastily written get-us-out-of-a-hole reviews and to my mind have done several of the books a great disservice.
But hark at me getting all above myself down here in the juniors.
The idea advanced by the Telegraph is that anyone can now bluff about the Booker, well no bluffing here.
Bookerthon 2007 has me running like Paula to try and get a rounded and balanced view of this year's list that will hopefully sift out the books that you wouldn't mind paying good money for.
Now 9/13ths of the way around this undulating Bookerthon course and I'm fending off the fatigue and cramp, though I fully expect to hit the wall any day now. I'm getting blisters pressure sores, I've needed regular stops at the fortified drinks table and am blessing St Plimsoll for the existence of non-Booker listed Clare Wigfall because her short stories, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, have been like slipping off the running shoes and dousing my feet in a bowl of divine cold water.
Short bursts of quietly understated writing that is not declaring itself from the rooftops with a megaphone.
Generally I am pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying most of the books but as I'm running reading there's a big cloud hovering over me, I know that I have the final huge uphill climb ahead that is the 800+ page Darkmans by Nicola Barker. Actually this is the one I'm really looking forward to, in that masochistic I-love-running-really way, because no one seems able to get a grip on this book to review it objectively.
Here in blogland we're allowed to be as subjective as we like, out there in the grown up world of Lit Crit you should probably guard against such baggy flabby indiscipline and the critics are sorely exercised in the process.
Even the Sams are struggling.
Sam Leith (incidentally literary editor of the Telegraph) goes for hands up honesty in the Literary Review,

"I can't finally say for sure exactly what, if anything, this book is trying to tell us, or what even in more than the broadest outline is going on. I'm not even 100 per cent sure if it is any good.But I know it's doing something highly original and interesting...the very night I finished it, it showed up in my dreams. Seriously."

Much as I hate to flag up a blogger under seige, head to that bear pit that is the Guardian blog and Sam Jordison's Booker read and see what a bit of online insurrection looks like for real. Poor Sam may now be wishing he'd never stepped up for this particular challenge and will doubtless be glad to get to The Welsh Girl this week for a bit of peace and quiet, if you see what I mean.
Darkmans clearly the book that is going to cleave the world asunder.
Personally I'm hoping to find myself in the same camp as Patrick Ness

"Darkmans is just the sort of bravura performance that will probably inspire vitriol in a certain breed of reviewer as too ostentatious, too brazen. Pity them, reader, for being unable to embrace such a loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. Barker is a great, restless novelist, and Darkmans is a great, restless novel. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren't 838 more."

I'm perfectly primed and ready to be "swept along in a tide of language" but I do have the emperor's new clothes waiting in the wings just in case.

Bookerthon 2007 :The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Despite the fact I happened to be wearing bright pink socks last Friday and I quite like the colour in small doses, I'm not sure how I like it on book jackets, so that may have been enough to deter me from even picking up The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.
Fortunate then that the Booker judges have no such ridiculous prejudices and saw fit to long list this one.
Something strange is happening with this whole Booker Prize thing this year.
Usually I'm wading in already with those "Here we go...load of old rubbish" posts, "Here's the one I've hated, place your bets, it's bound to win" and the Booker longlist is the only time I do that, turkeys don't make it on here as a rule.
So this year I'm four previous reads and three new reads in, that makes seven total, more than half and I've enjoyed them all.
These are normal books that people will really enjoy reading.
That can't be right?
That's not what the Booker has been about.
No worries,six books to go, there's still plenty of time for that classic Booker moment.
Last year The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, this year The Reluctant Fundamentalist for the archetypal post 9/11 novel slot, because I assume this is now a genre of its own.
Changez excels as a foreign student from Pakistan at an Ivy League university and heads into big business in New York as a company valuer. As 9/11 happens and attitudes harden towards all Muslims it is his own life and heritage that he is forced to put a value on as he makes his choices about where he truly belongs.
Narrated in the first person by Changez (that name surely of significance?) who is speaking throughout to an anonymous American.His first person narrative cleverly speaking for the American too who is carefully silenced throughout; all his thoughts, words and responses mediated through and qualified by Changez.
The Western voice is effectively silenced as the Islamic voice is allowed to speak, interpret and often arrive at conclusions based on preconceived assumptions.
How big a lesson is that to all of us?
At one point Changez grows a beard and is immediately eyed with suspicion.Mohsin Hamid constantly makes the point, we all initially judge by what we see.
Questions of narrative reliability constantly creeping into my mind as I read and then suddenly confirmed by Changez himself

"I cannot now recall many of the details of the events I have been relating to you. But surely it is the gist that matters; I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you - an American - will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's own details"

A good read and a longlister worthy of inclusion.

Bookerthon 2007:The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies and a quick kick of myself because John Self over at Asylum has been the literary world's answer to Gipsy Acora with this year's longlist, his predictions for this one and several others to be there spot on.
I could have read it weeks ago in that case and now look, I've got thousands of pages to read in a matter of weeks and I'll never do it and what am I doing this for and...
Just feast your eyes on that cover for a start.
The old London Transport travel poster style, could easily be a Margaret Calkin James who I lauded on here a while ago.Bookhound with his graphic design hat on also very taken with it and discovers that this font we all know and love is possibly New Johnston.
It's a winner already in that case, even if it's rubbish it'll look nice on the coffee table.
Thankfully The Welsh Girl as far removed from rubbish as it's possible to get.
Set mostly in nationalist Wales and for writers constantly seeking new angles on WWII fiction Peter Ho Davies has mined a rich new seam for me.The German prisoner-of-war camp bringing the stark realities of the war to this remote part of Wales.Rudolph Hess gets a look in too amongst a range of unusual and complex characters; the prisoners feeling "the crushing, suffocating sense of a whole nation's hatred" the whacky but troubled radio comics, the fiesty little evacuees, the enigmatic exiled German-Jewish interrogator and the lovely Welsh girl herself, Esther.
The book is gentle even in its grittiest moments and quite beautifully written.So much so that I had to keep pausing to consider the profound deeps because here's a book about pride and honour, surrender, defeat and shame all woven into the lives of ordinary people in the last years of the war.
I'm at one with Claire Messud's "each sentence is a pleasure" and Ann Patchett's "perfectly rendered".
Years and years since I read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro but something kept on reminding me of that book.Tone? Mood? Ambience? I'm not sure but I plan an in depth catch-up read of Ishiguro later this year so perhaps it'll come to me or not.
Now for those of you sitting out in my waiting room comments section nursing a relapse of hyper-sheerbloodymindedness about reading anything off a prize list ever, Sally that's you, I am going to prescribe a seven day course of The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies and please remember it is very important to finish all courses of prescribed medication.
Rhys, as you inform me you can only read twenty-three pages a day you'll need a two week course.
This one a certainty for my shortlist, I don't know about anyone else's.

Booker Indies

Interesting that a couple of the Booker longlisters are from small Independent publishers and not wishing to  lay any claims to having discovered them, both have found their way onto dgr scribbles in recent months.
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn was spotted by the C&P (Crockatt & Powell, not Crime & Punishment) boys eons ago, they raved about it and made Susan Hill read it. Susan Hill loved it and blogged accordingly.
Had she not I may never have heard about it, the power of the blog speaks for itself. I was smitten enough to make it my BAFAB prize back in April and after a few hiccups it arrived with the winner who has also loved it.
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng came to me as a proof copy from the unknown of the unknowns, Myrmidon Books and this one slapped me gently right between the eyes.Sometimes along comes a read that removes the blinkers and reveals world events from an entirely new and different perspective; suddenly something you thought you knew enough about becomes a subject you actually knew very little about. In this case Malaya during WWII. It's a book that moved me and gripped in equal measure.
I think between you and me we might have been among the first to feature The Gift of Rain and Tan Twan Eng kindly did a dgr asks interview for me which you can read here.
It's difficult enough out here in the back of beyond to know which books deserve attention and to see beyond the hype and the hollering to find the brilliant reads that, for small publishers working with limited funds, may carry a very modest budget of zilch in the publicity department.That was one of the many and diverse reasons for starting this blog.I could either carry on whingeing or start scribbling.
If I want to find and read them then plenty of others must want to do likewise, we don't all live at the hub of literary universes and here are some of the very best reads yet they never feature in the literary review pages or the magazines, so word of indie bookshop and word of blog is becoming a great route for spreading the news.
I still can't believe that The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower hasn't had a major review, or have I missed it?
Perhaps the literary editors think it's rubbish, but I have yet to meet anyone who hasn't been bowled over by the breathtaking scope and scale of that book.
Even worse I discover that it's just as difficult to get these books onto the mainstream bookshop shelves. Perhaps the broadsheets should allocate a weekly centre-page spread to Indie publications?
Suddenly I'm thinking the Indies should just band together and set up their own review magazine, no big guns allowed.
I'd subscribe.
Now I've probably shot myself right in the foot because...
I'm quite very excited to have been invited to speak at the Publisher's Publicity Circle lunch at Foyle's soon (me...speak...Foyles...same sentence...amazing!) about book blogging and without giving away the entire content of my allotted ten minutes this will be a very salient point to make to this gathering of publisher's PR and marketing people.
In the year and a bit since I started dgr scribbles I am discovering that the value of the ordinary reader's honest and trusted opinion is frequently sought and increasingly respected.
That aside there are two other things I'm really looking forward to on that day.
Firstly, meeting all the lovely people I know via e mail who very kindly send me books to review.Please come and say hello, can't imagine PR people are backwards in coming forward.
Secondly, it will be a nice change to do a talk that differs slightly in content from my usual fare, Negotiating with a Terrorist of Your Own, How to Potty Train the Reluctant Toddler.

Listeria Bibliophilogenes

You may have understood Listeria Monocytogenes to be a Gram-positive rod shaped bacteria commonly found in soil, streams, sewage and food (stay off the Brie if you are pregnant) and responsible for a rare but possibly lethal food-borne infection, Listeriosis.
Well you would be right and I am well aware that it is a serious and opportunistic infection and therefore I wouldn't wish to trivialize it in any way or worry you needlessly, but there is another strain mutating and it is starting to spread like wildfire.
Listeria Bibliophilogenes.
This form of infection manifests as an obsessive-compulsive need to read book prize lists.
I picked up the virulent Listeria Bibliophilogenes strain years ago, a lifetime of exposure to books places many of us at a high risk of contagion and there is evidence to show that others may have been born with some form of it, placental transfer research currently in its infancy (if pregnant don't be alarmed, just keep on reading because you won't have a minute afterwards)
So far my immune system has always failed to produce the antibodies required so I am at constant risk of relapse.
Once exposed to a book prize list, the incubation period for my own form of Listeria Bibliophilogenes has now reduced to about five minutes.
Early symptoms set in with great rapidity.

• The brilliant book I was reading but a minute ago no longer has the remotest appeal.
• I'm quickly dashing around my shelves to see which books I already have and grouping them on a shelf of their own.
  
• Logging onto the online library catalogue to see what's available and can I nab it before anyone else
• Throwing pride and caution to the wind and writing humiliating begging letters to publishers. 
• When all else fails flexing my credit card at The Book Depository for the remainder of the list which I want to arrive yesterday.

My Listeria Bibliophilogenes is at an advanced stage and so I have discovered it is useless to try and fight it.
Heaven knows how I have tried.
New and very expensive drugs come on the market and even though the very helpful people at NICE have phoned and said that they have allocated a full course of treatment targeted on my exact post code, no lottery involved they are mine for the taking, I have declined.
I of all people know how the NHS can ill-afford such a generous gesture especially towards a member of staff, we can't expect preferential treatment here at dgr scribbles when I feel sure that at Asylum and Eve's Alexandria no such offers have been made.
Currently I await a decision on my application to become a registered LB sufferer which would mean I could get the books on prescription.
I'm quite a bad case, intractable in fact, so would probably have to go onto a daily script.
The Booker Prize Long List announcement arrived last Tuesday evening at about 6.30pm and by 6.35pm it was clear a relapse was imminent.
I tried to phone my key-worker, out of hours - some hope, but it was too late anyway.
The decks were cleared, all other reading put on hold, great books half-read pushed to one side to make way for the young upstarts.
This picture revealing the unique molecular structure of the Listeria Bibliophilogenes strain as it starts to replicate.
I'm now deeply into reading the Booker Long List, getting great e mails from fellow sufferers who are all coping as well as can be expected with relapses of their own and we are all going to support each other through this terrible and trying time.

Booker Longlist announced

Hot news has just whizzed in from my Bookerthon colleague over at Asylum, here's the longlist for starters, more thoughts later but so far I've read and posted about four of them and yes I will have to read Ian McEwan.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, (Jonathan Cape)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
Winnie & Wolf by AN Wilson (Hutchinson)

Bookerthon 2007

Suddenly we find it is upon us, John Self's Asylum and dovegreyreader scribbles have been hatching a joint blog assault on the 2007 Booker longlist for several weeks and we have but four weeks to complete before the shortlist is announced.
Tomorrow is Day the First as the longlist, The Man Booker Dozen (which feels much better than the Man Booker Twenty-Two of previous years) is announced and the first declaration here will be how many, if any, of the books have I read so far?
I've tried to keep up to speed with the new and the contemporary this year but I can't wait to see what the judges have settled on.
Meanwhile the new Man Booker website is launched and is awash with great links, information and discussion forums and well worth a visit.

Booker-thon 2007

I see the Booker judging panel has been announced and sadly I don't seem to be on it again.
This year though, good news, the longlist is to be limited to 12 books.Very welcome after the scurry of the last few years when those of us who have always had a go at reading along have had to source 20 or so books from the library service or beg from publishers.
Then try and read them in an impossibly short time, Booker-thon 2006 will take you to all those posts and the madness that it all was.
Every year I say I won't do it and every year something grips me and I can't bear not to at least try, thereby maintaining my 100% record of NEVER choosing the winner.
I might as well admit it now, I'm constantly in training, always at the peak of fitness, so fully expect the dovegreyreader Bookerthon to be on again as usual.
Anyone going to join me?