Book Clubs, Blurbs and the Booker

The book club I belong to works like this: We aim to have 12 members. Each member selects a book they would like the club to read. These books then form a list of 12, one for each month of the year. Everyone buys/borrows their own copies of all the books and when it is your book and your month you host the club, and you conduct the discussion.

Possession by AS Byatt was the book for May – my selection. Good decision, yes? Hmm, I don’t think so. For one thing it was 511 pages long. According to Ten Ways to win the Booker prize (http://bit.ly/2scYmlC) by Mona Chalabi and George Arnett, 374 pages is an average for a Man Booker winner. For another thing, the book was full of poetry. This proved to be a good and a bad thing. One book club member ‘loved’ the poetry, while most of the rest skipped this part in favour of the plot. Gasp, skipped some pages!? Well, since I was conducting the discussion I didn’t skip. I slogged my way through which meant that by the time I’d read the book, prepared the discussion, baked the food and cleaned my house I was exhausted.

But wasn’t Possession an excellent choice because it was a Man Booker winner? Not necessarily. For us anyway. In the ensuing discussion it turned out that most of us (South Africans) didn’t like the works of JM Coetzee, another Man Booker Prize winner. This got me thinking about how books are selected for this prestigious prize (which carries a top winnings of GBP 50,000). Ten Ways to win the Booker prize (http://bit.ly/2scYmlC) says to win: you can’t be too young; you should choose a short title; get a private education; study at Oxford; be a man (if possible); write about death loads and love a fair bit; and get published with Jonathan Cape.

Well there you have it. I must say I hadn’t chosen Possession because I knew its author AS Byatt was a Booker winner. I didn’t (know she was a winner). I chose it because the blurb made it sound so exciting. ‘Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance…. A novel for every taste…. You turn the last page feeling stunned and elated, happy to have had the chance to read it.’ It wasn’t (exciting). For me, at any rate. Which just goes to show that: 1) It wasn’t a novel for every taste. And,  2) Booker prize recommendations and blurbs don’t necessarily equal books that everyone will enjoy.

Onto the next booker prize winning book for next month: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (this author writes about death loads…).

Add to Your Book List All the Light We Cannot See

In just the first few weeks of January I’ve come across several 2017 “reading challenges”. They’re lists that go from “light” (13 books per year) to “obsessed” (one per week). Some of these lists suggest that the reader try a variety of types, e.g. a book about a hobby, a book about science, Christian living reader, one written in the twentieth century, one about writing, and so on.

I stay away from lists like these as I consider myself definitely on the “light” side of the spectrum. But that’s partly because I have generally discounted in the count anything I don’t read slowly for leisure. By leisure I mean book club reads, favourite genres, the ones you spend hours with at night time, while in bed eating chocolate. But when I counted up everything I’d read (or at least was part-way through) in the first three weeks of this new year, to my surprise, my tally was seven.

One of those was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This was a book-club-leisure-in-bed-with-chocolate read. And I loved it. It’ll be a book I remember, not one I simply needed to tick off on an “obsessed” reader list. It was published a couple of years ago and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story is set during WWII and revolves around two young people from enemy sides linked through war and the radio. The radio, of course, was an important medium of both propaganda and rebellion at that time. Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, falls on the side of “rebellion”, while Werner, a German orphan, falls on the side of “propaganda”. Thrown into the mix is a valuable diamond that is secreted out of the Paris museum at which Marie-Laure’s father works. The stone brings into the story themes of desire, and blessing or curse, depending on how the diamond is treasured or viewed. The characters are well-drawn and complex and I came to care deeply about them.

The chapters are very short and alternate between Marie-Laure’s story and Werner’s, until right near the end when the two merge. This makes for easy reading, adds to the building tension and draws the reader in with a growing sense of foreboding. The sentences, too, are short and the vocabulary economical (I disagree with one reviewer’s viewpoint that the book was verbose and too full of adjectives). I’ve made a mental note to emulate this writer if I get the chance to write fiction.

So, if you’re a book list person, or want a meaningful story to immerse yourself in, I highly recommend All the Light We Cannot See.