Tag: If I Gave the Award

If I Gave the Award

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Since I just reviewed Western Lane, that finishes my reading of the shortlist for the 2023 Booker Prize. This means it’s time for my feature, where I decide whether the judges got it right.

Although I was indifferent to a few of the books on this list, there were two that I liked so much it will be difficult to choose between them, and this year, most of the others were very good. As I often do, I’ll lead up to the best ones. All of the books chosen this time were very well written.

The book that resonated with me the least was Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. It was mostly a character study of a very particular woman, one who is completely obedient to her brother. I said I felt like I was being psychologically tortured when I read it.

Although darkly funny at times, I found If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery also a bit whiny. It’s about a Jamaican-American young man trying to figure out his own identity and community in Southern Florida, but he keeps making really bad decisions.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo is about the grief of a family over the loss of their mother, which 11-year-old Gopi copes with by her success in playing squash. I found it touching and said it had floundering but sympathetic characters. So, here we are getting into more interesting territory.

I found the subject matter of This Other Eden by Paul Harding very interesting. The historical novel is based on a true event, when the State of Maine decided to evict several mixed-race families that had been living on an island since 1793. It’s no coincidence that this turn-of-the-20th-century event took place just after a Eugenics conference. Although I occasionally found Harding’s extended poetical metaphors annoying (and sometimes liked them), I found this novel to be touching. This is the first book in the shortlist that I read, way back in 2023, so unfortunately, I don’t remember it very well.

The last two novels each ended up on my Best of the Year lists in successive years that I read them. One is The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It is a complex novel about the problems faced by a family. As it looks at the situations from each family member’s perspective in turn, family secrets are revealed. It’s hard to see from my description of this book just why I found it so good, but I was gripped from the start. I say that it is unexpectedly suspenseful in the last 50 pages and that the ending blew my mind (if only I could remember what it was).

I read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch a year earlier than The Bee Sting but remember it a little better. It’s the rare dystopian novel that I found absolutely gripping, about Ireland becoming a totalitarian state, which absolutely chimes in with current events. Prophet Song was the winner for this year. I’m thinking that for me, the choice between it and The Bee Sting is hard, as I describe both as gripping. I also say that Prophet Song has long, poetic sentences that create a sense of urgency. I guess it’s almost a tie for me between this book and The Bee Sting, but I’ll say that the judges got it right.

If I Gave the Award

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With my review of Telephone, I’ve finished the shortlist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. Now it’s time for my feature where I decide if the judges got it right.

The Pulitzer is unusual, because there are usually only three or four books on the shortlist (although I prefer that to having lots and lots of books on the shortlist). For this year, there are three, a collection of short stories, most of them historical, a historical novel, and a contemporary novel, so they are hard to compare.

The winner was The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, a novel based on her grandfather’s work to save the Turtle Mountain Chippewa from being “emancipated” by the U. S. Congress (another attempt to abrogate treaties and steal land from the indigenous peoples) all the while working full-time as a night watchman. I felt that this tale was engrossing and that otherwise the novel was filled with interesting characters and subplots.

A Registry of My Passage on the Earth by Daniel Mason is a collection of short stories, many of them historical and some of them quirky, mostly about scientific curiosity or the characters’ perceived or actual potential. I liked them very much. Most of them had an optimistic tenor and felt like they were miniature historical novels.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is about a man’s obsession with helping others as an expression of his own grief over his daughter’s fatal illness. This is a novel that famously has three different versions. I was frustrated by the main character’s tendency to go rushing off on his Quixotic expeditions, trying to gain some kind of control but leaving his poor wife to deal with their dying daughter by herself.

I liked Everett’s book the least of the three but have a harder time deciding between the other two. But I guess, from the interest of its subject matter, I pick Erdrich’s novel. That means the judges got it right!

If I Gave the Award

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With my review of These Days, I’ve finished the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. So, it’s time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right.

This time, the decision is difficult, because there are no books that stood out for me and also because it has been several years since I read some of the books. With the Walter Scott Prize, in particular, I often have to wait a while before the books become available in my library, if that ever happens. In this case, I finally was able to check out the last hold-out just recently.

Let’s start with the books I liked least. I am really not a fan of Simon Mawer. I always feel a great distance from his characters, plus I do not appreciate his apparent compulsion to mention certain female parts in every single book. This time, I found Ancestry, about his own ancestors, a little more interesting in subject matter, but I still noticed those same issues.

As for Adrian Duncan’s The Geometer Lobachevsky, about a Russian surveyor in 1950s Ireland who decides not to return to the Soviet Union, I acknowledged the book’s descriptive passages but said I felt meh about it. It doesn’t really have much of a plot but is more about day-to-day existence and the details of work.

I really didn’t like any of the characters in Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion, about the hunt that begins after the Restoration for two men who signed the death warrant for Charles I. Harris’s recounting of brutal acts of war on both sides made me lose my usual preference for the Royalists. This book was interesting in its portrayal of the wildness of New England in the 17th century, though, as that’s where the two men go, with their pursuer behind them.

I found it hard to follow which narrator was speaking in I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnanbalam. This book was about one of Paul Gauguin’s teenage Polynesian wives, not a very willing partner. Yes, I said one. Although I found some things in this book confusing and the viewpoint really foreign to me, it was more interesting to me than some of the others.

I think I liked the next two books about the same. They were both interesting and beautifully written. The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane is about a community searching for a lost boy in the 19th century Australian Outback. These Days by Lucy Caldwell is about a family caught up in the Belfast Blitz. It is the actual winner for 2023, and it’s a compelling read.

Although again, I didn’t think there were any stand-outs this year, the novel I liked best was The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry, about the grief and guilt of Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife. Hardy has been oblivious to his wife’s unhappiness until he discovers her diary after her death.

This novel just runs better with my own interests as an admirer of Hardy’s work. So, I pick The Chosen. Nevertheless, These Days was my second-to-best choice, so the judges were at least in the ballpark.

If I Gave the Award

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With my review of English Magic, I have completed reading the shortlist of the 2022 James Tait Black Fiction Prize. That means it’s time for my feature, where I decide whether the judges got it right. This year is particularly difficult for me, because none of the books really clicked with me.

I’ll start with the winner, A Shock by Keith Ridgway. In my review, I quoted its pretentious back cover: “a rondel of interlocking stories . . . both deracinated and potent with place, druggy but shot through with a terrifying penetration of reality.” I reviewed this book two years ago, and frankly, I can’t remember a thing about it. It is a collection of short stories that I did not find engaging, centered around a pub.

English Magic by Uschi Gatward is another collection of short stories. I found it a mixed bag, although all of its details are minutely observed. Again, I didn’t connect with many of the stories, several of which were about political activism. Unlike A Shock, they didn’t seem to have any common themes or settings.

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge would seem to be more my style, about a black young woman in pre-Civil War Brooklyn whose mother wants her to become a doctor. However, Libertie behaves like a spoiled modern young woman, and one of my pet peeves is a historical novel that has its characters behave out of their time. Libertie makes one bad decision after another, wasting her opportunities.

That leaves Memorial by Bryan Washington, about the relationship between two gay young men, one a black American and one Japanese, and their relationships to their families. Although its humor went over my head and I don’t like explicit sex, I found it perceptive and sometimes touching.

I am winding up this project, and I think I only have three books to read for the 2021 shortlist. My library hasn’t had any of them.

If I Gave the Award

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With my review of Absolutely & Forever, I have finished the shortlisted books for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. That means it’s time for my feature, where I decide whether the judges got it right.

This year was quite an international event, with books set in England, Trinidad, Italy, Malaysia, and Canada making the shortlist. As has become my usual approach, I’ll start with the books I liked least.

It’s almost a toss-up between two books as to which I should start with, but I think that will be Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein, which for this year was the winning novel. Although I was interested in the setting, the brutality in the book made me comment that if I wasn’t reading it for the prize, I wouldn’t read it at all. This was a novel about a young boy growing up in 1940s Trinidad, his feud with town boys and his father’s affair with a rich woman.

The other book I didn’t like as well was The New Life by Tom Crewe. I thought the subject matter was interesting, loosely based on the lives of two collaborators on a book about sexuality, but I don’t really like explicit sex scenes, and this book had lots of them.

In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas is about Canada’s history with slavery and treatment of indigenous peoples. I commented that Thomas’s approach of telling stories to fit in as much information as possible didn’t work very well for me. I thought there were too many characters, and he was trying to fit in so much in that it got confusing.

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is about a real group of people in Rome during World War II who helped Allied soldiers escape from Nazi-occupied Italy. Although the subject matter was interesting and I enjoyed the book, I commented that as the first of a trilogy, I wondered where the material was going to come from for two more books.

Now, I have got to my two favorites, and I am having a hard time deciding which one to pick. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain is a coming-of-age story, sort of, set in 1960s England. I just loved the voice of its narrator and was captivated by it (although since the 15-year-old heroine was the same age as Tremain in the 1960s, it doesn’t really fit my definition of a historical novel). However, I think I’m going to pick The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng about, among other things, Somerset Maugham’s visit to Malaysia in the 1920s.

If I Gave the Award

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Having read all of the shortlisted books for the 2022 Booker Prize, I see that it is time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right. For this year the choice is difficult for me because I didn’t like many of the books.

As I sometimes do, I’ll start with the book I liked least. That is Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo. Bulawayo’s intent was to explain events in the recent history of Zimbabwe, but her choice to make the characters animals did nothing for me. In fact, it made the characters flat. I also had little tolerance for all the religious and political speeches, and the book’s repetition. I did not finish this book after reading more than half of it.

There was something strange to me also about the approach Percival Everett takes with The Trees. This novel is about the lynching of Black people that took place for centuries in the American South and in particular, the murder of Emmett Till. However, Everett makes it a mystery about some grotesque murders and creates Southern white characters who are almost caricatures of themselves. On reflection, for such a serious subject it seems to indicate an odd sense of humor.

The winner for this year was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a dead man who is trying to reveal photographs he has taken of the Sri Lankan civil war. I was very interested in the history of Sri Lanka, which is not a country I know about, but I didn’t enjoy his depiction of a grotesque afterlife. (The book reminded me a bit of the afterlife depicted in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, although I found that book ultimately more touching.)

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is a fantasy novella about a boy left alone in an unusual world. It was interesting and imaginative, a fast read that resembled a fairy tale, but it didn’t do much for me.

I always like a book by Elizabeth Strout because of the writing and the gentleness with which she treats her characters. However, Oh, William!, about Lucy Barton’s ex-husband and his family secrets, seemed slight to me when compared to some of the other books.

The book I enjoyed most for its writing and its theme was Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, about the Magdalen laundries. Keegan is another excellent writer. I guess I’ll pick it for its beautiful, pared-down prose.

If I Gave the Award

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Now that I have posted my review of the last of the shortlist for the 2020 Pulitizer Prize for Fiction, it’s time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right. The Pulitzer Prize tends to choose only three books for its shortlist, so in some ways the choice is easier, in some ways more difficult. In this case, two of the choices were ones I really liked.

Let’s start with the one I didn’t like as much, The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. Now, there is nothing intrinsically unlikable about Lerner’s books, it’s just that they’re all about himself, as evidenced by his alter ego, Adam Gordon, being the protagonist for all and having a biography very similar to his own. I’m saying this on the basis of two books, but I think it’s true. The novels are somewhat funny, poking subtle fun at himself, and he is obviously into wordplay, but I guess I just don’t like him very much. In this case, the novel focuses on Adam’s high school years, his relationships with his friends and girlfriend, and his prowess on the debating team.

The choice between the other two novels is difficult for me. The Dutch House was my favorite Ann Patchett novel until she wrote Tom Lake, and frankly, they’re pretty much a tie for me. It’s about the disastrous effects on his children of a father’s lack of understanding, almost a willful blindness, of both his first wife, the children’s mother, and his second. It’s about the consequent loss of his children’s inheritance, the Dutch house, and their fascination with it. And it’s about the closeness of siblings who only had each other to rely on. I really love this book.

I was gripped, though, by The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, the winning book. It’s a historical novel about the mistreatment and even murder of black boys in a Florida school for boys, aka, a detention center, based on the true history of the Dozier School for Boys. Its protagonist, Elwood Curtis, is a right-minded boy who makes the mistake of accepting a ride from a stranger in what turns out to be a stolen car. Once incarcerated in the school, he begins collecting a record of the abuses he sees.

It’s not hard to see why the judges picked The Nickel Boys over The Dutch House, a more personal novel. But that’s what I like about it. Both novels touched me emotionally, so I guess this time I declare a tie. I didn’t love The Nickel Boys as I loved The Dutch House, but it is extremely powerful. They are both very good novels.

If I Gave the Award

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Cover for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

I’m way behind on finishing the shortlisted books for the 2011 James Tait Black prize, but now that I have, it’s time for my feature, where I say whether the judges got it right. This year’s shortlist is unusual, because it contains three historical novels out of the four. It’s also going to be difficult from my perspective because I loved two of the books on the shortlist, but I haven’t read one of them since 2012.

Let’s start with my least favorite book. That one is La Rochelle by Michael Nath. This novel has a vestigial plot about a missing girlfriend and a friend’s obsession with her. But mostly it is about the main character, whom I found unpleasantly fascinated with women’s anatomy and not afraid to say so. The novel deals with nights of drinking too much with the missing women’s partner until the main character finally does something different, ending a labyrinthine scheme that I thought was silly and absolutely unnecessary.

Next is my second least favorite of the four, which was the winner for that year, The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli. When I originally started to read it, I had forgotten why I was reading it and took it for a standard historical novel about a woman photographer’s affairs with a married man and then with his assistant. However, it turned out to really be about the experience of being a war correspondent during the Vietnam War and the main character’s growing love for the country. After giving it a second try, I finished it, but I still felt quite a bit of distance from the characters.

Now we get to two favorite books. The first one was the book I read long ago and for which I wrote my fifth review for this blog, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. Although it had hints of the sci-fi time travelers that he incorporates into most of his novels, at that time I had only read one other book by him, and the focus on historical fiction was so strong that I didn’t notice them. The main character is an employee of the Dutch East Indies company in 18th century Japan. He is fascinated by the culture, even though the Dutch are restricted to one island off the coast and the Japanese are generally not allowed on the island. He falls in love with a Japanese girl who is allowed on the island as the student of a Swedish physician. When he refuses to participate in his boss’s graft, he is deserted on the island and makes his way to the main island. I found the descriptions of the customs and laws of Japan at the time really interesting, and the book becomes an adventure.

But another type of adventure is experienced by the main characters of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. This novel was based on the experiences of her grandparents during World War II. The main character, a Hungarian Jew, arrives in Paris in 1937 to study architecture, but he soon loses his scholarship because of anti-Semitism. He also meets an older woman with whom he falls in love. This novel becomes one of great breadth, covering events of World War II, the Hungarian Holocaust, life in work camps, and the siege of Budapest.

I so much enjoyed both of these last two novels that it’s hard to pick, but I choose The Invisible Bridge, simply because of its depth and breadth, and also just slightly because I have a vague recollection that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet eventually goes to some places that were a bit unbelievable.

If I Gave the Award

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Having reviewed the last of the shortlisted books for the 2023 James Tait Black Award, I am ready for my regular feature, in which I decide whether the judges got it right. I have to say that in terms of my own reading enjoyment, the 2023 shortlist was a tough one.

Bolla by Pajtim Statovci, set in Kosovo before and during the Balkan War, is about a love affair between two male students, one Serbian and one Albanian. Although it was beautifully written and ultimately touching, I so disliked its main character that I had difficulty reading it.

Indifference to the main character was my problem with Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi. In this dreamy novel, the main character, an Omani student in England, contemplates the life of the woman she considered her grandmother and finds parallels with her own. I was more interested in the historical parts of this novel than in the contemporary ones.

I found the histories of lesbian women in After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schartz to be interesting. However, there were just too many characters for me to keep track of, and the vignettes about the women were too short for me to really feel like I could differentiate the women from each other.

The winner of the award for this year was Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a modern retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield set in rural Southwestern Virginia. Although I had problems with this novel as well, it was certainly a spellbinding tale. So, this time I have to say that the judges got it right. Although they don’t seem to publicize the longlist, this selection makes me wonder what was on it.

If I Gave the Award

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Real Life by Brandon Taylor was the last of the books shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize that I had to review, so having done that, it’s time for my feature where I decide if the judges got it right. For 2020, the shortlist included one dystopian novel, one historical novel, and four that are more or less contemporary. One of the novels was set in Zimbabwe, one in India, one in Ethiopia, and one in Scotland, the others in the United States. Two involve unlikable heroines.

I didn’t dislike any of these novels, but there were a couple I didn’t actually like that much, either. These were two quite different novels, The New Wilderness by Diane Cook and This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The New Wilderness is a dystopian novel about people who go to live in the wilderness after climate change leaves their city air too dangerous to breathe. They are forced to leave no trace, and the living conditions are brutal, but it was the lack of character development and what I felt was unlikely behavior of the people that left me cold. I was most interested in the character of Bea, but she disappears from the novel early on and it centers on her daughter, whom I didn’t find interesting.

As far as This Mournable Body is concerned, I think part of my problem is that it is the third in a series, which I didn’t know before reading it. So, I found it difficult to follow at times. It is about Zimbabwe during the rule of Mugabe, but it is mostly concerned with Tambudzai, an embittered and unlikable woman who always thinks, because of her education, that she deserves more than she is getting. Yet when she does get a job, she does poorly because she thinks she deserves more.

I find myself grouping these novels in pairs this time. The next two I liked better. Real Life was written with a morose atmosphere that was hard to get past. It’s about a young Black gay man trying to work in a graduate program in science at a university where almost everyone else is White. Although the main character has a lot to put up with, peers who are trying to sabotage him and his experiments and lots of slights and racist comments, I found it frustrating that instead of explaining things to his friends or standing up for himself, he kept telling people everything was fine. He seemed to think this was a way to fit in, but instead he undercut himself. Also, I am not a fan of explicit sex scenes of any kind.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi follows the activities of a woman who grows up to be an artist from her girlhood days when her mother moves into an ashram to be the lover of the guru. There, she was alternately neglected and mistreated, brought up mostly by another woman. Now her mother is beginning to experience dementia so is left to the care of her daughter. I found the main character unlikable, but I also said I found the novel fascinating, which I don’t remember in retrospect.

I have to put The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart in my last and best group. The Shadow King is a historical novel about Ethiopia’s war with Italy just before World War II. It follows the fate of Hirut, a young girl who belongs to the household of Kidane, a leader in the revolt against the Italians. Although I was slow to warm to the novel, I came to feel that it was powerful and effective.

As for Shuggie Bain, which was the 2020 winner, about a young poor gay Scottish boy, well, I feel the judges got it right this time. The Bains are deserted by their father, and their elegant mother becomes an alcoholic. One by one, Shuggie’s older siblings leave, and he is left to try to care for his mother. I found this novel moving, gripping, and heart-breaking.