The Mookse and the Gripes discussion
Booker Prize for Fiction
>
2019 Booker Shortlist Discussion
Yes that reference to it being shortlisted for other prizes, and the fact that two of the judges couldn't even finish it, does suggest Ducks was picked more as 'most successful novel in other awards by a Scottish author' rather than because of any literary quality perceived by the jury of this prize.
I don’t think I can enjoy the literary awards anymore. The peek behind the curtain at how and why books are nominated, and why some outstanding books have no chance at being nominated, has turned me off of awards. Like all devoted readers I have limited time to read, and by trying to read as many long- and shortlisted books as possible for various awards I read books I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in and so don’t read books I want to read, like the books from subscriptions. After learning that the books aren’t all selected based solely on quality in the first place I’m now far less inclined to care.
In 2020 I’m going to only read books that I want to read and those that come highly recommended by readers I trust, including the readers in this group, of course. I’m a bit sad about that because I love lists and the run up to the winner was fun.
Moving forward it makes more sense for me to spend this year catching up on my TBR and then reading the nominated books from 2020 after the awards and after seeing how the books rated with trusted readers and reviewers. This is no guarantee that I will love every book I receive or buy, but the award thing is to much about money and publishing politics I’ve learned.
Not that I think awards are all bad, they do support the industry and they help new readers find the types of books they like, but at this point I don’t need them as a resource.
Argh, this latest row (about a prize I didn't even know existed) has me a bit boggled. Surely people should read the full shortlist - whether they like it or not. Judges get picked to judge, and you cannot do that if you don't have the information to do so. "And no one on the jury actually read all the shortlisted books!" is the most insane thing I've read in this entire season. (And who picked the shortlist?)
I don't like the politics and nonsense behind it all, but I do love the lists because inevitably they bring me to books I wouldn't find otherwise, or at least not within a similar timeframe.
Something else that's interesting to me is how many books this year and recently have explored the way political and societal reactions and reactionaries have blown up our common decency, then the juries and entrants all seem destined to play out these ideas in real life. I think, someday, we'll all look at all of these rows and blow-ups and upsets etc as just very typical of this era in general -- books or otherwise.
And I am a person who, when I get truly upset, likes to ask myself, "will I remember this in 5 years? If I do, will it seem funny by then?" I have a feeling all of this might be worth asking those questions about. Very little actually matters to the point of upset/anger after some time has passed. And some of my "worst" nightmares have become some of my funniest stories.
I think for most of the judges (including the one that resigned) the difficulty of learning a second language in a few months made it impossible to read all the books. The prize does seem oddly designed.
Interesting back story here also about a past controversy about a prize that Sam (the publisher of Ducks) runs which involves the winning author of the Saltire award. I can even claim a personal link here. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.th...
I have always been certain that judges don't read all the books. One year a Booker judge (Michael Portillo?) said that most entries could be set aside after a few pages. And I doubt that many people believe that every judge reads every shortlisted title three times. I mean, even the loudest proponents of Ducks could surely not imagine reading it three times in the space of three months.
I'm completely OK with picking up a book from the submissions pile, or even the longlist, and tossing it aside after a few pages if it really is not something that will move on in the reader's opinion - that clearly is the only way you weed through such huge piles. But when it comes to the shortlist, I honestly wonder how to judge a prize if you don't read the books. And if the books are in too many languages, then that's the prize's fault for setting it up that way.
However, I do hope that everyone on the booker list read all of the longlisted titles and all of the shortlisted titles once they moved along. Three times? Maybe not, but once they are getting into such a prestigious spot, it really is the charge of the jurors to read the freaking books. Otherwise they are recommending books for posterity that they've not read, and that's just silly.
I do agree that it is a juror's responsibility to read the books. That said, I know that many of these literary "jobs" are terribly paid, and might be the kind of thing you accept and then realize you still have to pay your bills with your own writing/editing/designing/teaching/all the other things literary people do for a living and things fall through the cracks. Especially thousand page novels and novels in Gaelic. ;-)
Emily wrote: "I know that many of these literary "jobs" are terribly paid, and might be the kind of thing you accept and then realize you still have to pay your bills with your own writing/editing/designing/teaching/all the other things literary people do for a living and things fall through the cracks. Especially thousand page novels and novels in Gaelic."This.
There are only so many hours in the day and to believe that all jurors read every book would just stretch credulity. I like to believe that by the time the shortlist has been decided, all the jurors will have read - or engaged with - all of the longlisted titles. But even then, I don't kid myself that they have all read all of the longlisters in their entirety, let alone twice.
The people that accept the offer to be a judge for a literary prize do so voluntarily and I’m guessing they accept knowing what is being asked of them. Accepting that responsibility and then not reading all the books in their entirety is dishonest and unethical.
Yes, but I am sure there is a difference between someone's expectation and reality. I simply don't believe anyone can read 170 full length novels in six months (150+13+6) while holding down a day job. There are just not enough hours in the day.I remember a few years ago seeing a book for sale on Abebooks that had a flysheet dropped in to indicate that it was a prize entry sent to a named judge - and the comment was made that the book appeared never to have been opened.
There are ways to 'read' too many books in short time. Skim reading or fast reading can do the trick at the early stage if coupled with a few comprehensive reviews from readers or peers. Audio versions can also save a huge amount of time (even if audios distort a book's perception especially with non-conventional narratives). Toss aside those that don't have a chance of getting further. Move on with those that show promise. Or something like that.I'm pretty sure none of the judges read all 150+ books in six months or so - 'read' as in you and I would read.
Mod
Formerly active GR member Hadrian regularly read over 250 books a year, quite a lot of them academic non-fiction, and when he took most of a year off due to illness read over 700. Or there was the university friend who basically did the "photographing pages" thing described in accounts of how fast some brilliant historical people, such as Oscar Wilde, read, to whom I lent a 1-volume trilogy of over 1000 pages for two days, including a long train journey there and back to some event, and who read that plus another shorter book in that time. Quite able to talk about afterwards so it was obvious she'd read it. However, the numbers of such people are relatively small and only a fraction of them will end up in occupations where they can be asked to judge a major literary prize. Though I would have thought that a fair number of big newspaper book critics must be ultra fast readers like this, and would look for similar ability in junior staff.
Antonomasia wrote: "Though I would have thought that a fair number of big newspaper book critics must be ultra fast readers like this, and would look for similar ability in junior staff."Interesting you should mention this as I caught one newspaper reviewer (who was a member of the Booker Prize forum at the time) who had reviewed two books she obviously hadn't read as she had made incorrect statements about the content that were based on logical assumptions drawn from the blurbs.
There are certainly fast and good readers (people on here read what I consider to be very large numbers of books a year). My experience with the literary community though, is that they are also chronic abandoners. They get huge numbers of free books, often from their editor friends who would like them to review it, have to teach a class on one, lead a book club on another, write a review of a third, judge a prize winner from ten others. And they have other things they'd actually like to read! The conscientious ones prioritize the prize and the reviews.An author I know says that every time he has a new book out, he is interviewed by book journalists from all the major papers who have clearly read nothing beyond the back cover. For a recent book, which dealt tangentially with blindness, a reporter came in, turned on his recorder and said: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Please comment."
If anyone is interested in a more academic take on book judging, this paper has just been published, coincidentally based on experience judging the Saltire Prize:http://www.lectitopublishing.nl/downl...
This from Boyd Tonkin is interesting and supports several of the points made below:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
The birth-pangs of the Booker endure five or six months and unfold in a glare of media gossip, innuendo, spite, envy, and authentic or concocted quarrels.
All this grief lands on top of the exhaustion that comes with reaching a judgement on 130 new novels, roughly from April to October, in the gaps between trying to run the rest of your rapidly-unravelling life.
This punishment attracts a flat fee of £3,000, which - especially after you have paid the tax on it - amounts to an hourly rate that the most desperate off- the-books burger-flipper would turn down with contempt. Did I read all the books? My judgement was that perhaps 80-90 (say two-thirds) merited serious attention from first page to last. They got it. Those titles that reached the long-and shortlist were closely re-examined. I had read the winner (a short, but dense novel) three times by the night of its victory.
As for the makeweights: if incompetence or simple mediocrity becomes howlingly evident in the first 50 to 100 pages of a novel submitted for the most illustrious award in Anglophone fiction, should judges have to persist to the bitter end? No one ever insisted that we should. That strikes me as fair.
He does conclude though he will definitely do it again. And it is written from the Goff era where call him Machiavellian, or call him Mephistophelean: the infinitely wily Goff long ago, and with the evident support of the Booker management committee, decided that virtually no publicity was bad publicity.
Mod
Again, I have no problem w/ opening a submitted book, reading a few pages, realizing it is not my cuppa and flinging it away with abandon. But by the time we get to short and longlists, I would hope they are actually reading these books. Nobody should ever push through a book they hate. What's the point in that? Obviously they aren't going to vote for it to advance anyway, so get rid of it! But if they want a book to advance, they should read the book. The idea of having a prize where no judge has read all of the shortlist is just beyond my comprehension - what is the point of the prize committee at that point? Why not just hold a raffle or lottery? (Yes, I know - the prizes are very similar to a lottery already.)
Further to the whose side were the Foundation on discussion, interesting Books of the Decade article by Gaby Wood, Director of the Booker Foundation in the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artis...In a generally non-Booker-centric article at one point she says:
E L James began writing Fifty Shades as fan fiction (inspired by Twilight) and published it online in 2011. Nine years later fans have all the power: harnessing the strength of social media, publishers have enlisted them to create a giant hype machine. By the time Margaret Atwood came to write this year's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, her fans had told her the name of her own protagonist, the television series based on it had given her an additional character, and a member of the public had got her name in the new book via a charity auction. So much about The Testaments was in response to popular demand that it could hardly fail to become a global event, and Atwood, with her wealth of wit, even seemed at times to be spoofing popular genres, as if writing fan fiction based on her own work.
She also concludes the article that there is a need for more diverse voices, citing Evaristo and Shafak as examples. And she also gives a strong nod to Margaret Busby, who is the person I mentioned upthread who was been asked if she wanted to join the 2020 jury.
Margaret Busby is an incredibly impressive woman - and I can't wait for x-mas b/c I'm getting the new companion to Daughters of Africa (called, shockingly, New Daughters of Africa.) The first book is possibly the most information-filled book I've ever read. I constantly pull it off the shelf behind my reading nook looking for things I know (or hope) are there. I learned of so many black writers. Of course I knew the obvious ones, but the list of new-to-me names in the early 1990s was long and has been a resource ever since. She's done an incredible job of opening history's doors and showing us that black women have been writing for a very long time and from almost every place on earth. It's a terrific resource. I would give up most of my books before I let that one go. I have great hopes for a much longer TBR after the new book arrives. (Yay - books are my favorite part of Christmas.)So I can only think that she would be a good addition to any panel because she brings a depth of knowledge that most people lack, and she's been reading diversely (in the somewhat narrow field of black female writers) for a long time, as well as her other work. She keeps a foot in the current world and her research takes her elsewhere. What I would hope is that we could avoid tokenism (the Booker has done a fairly good job of that recently) and hope for more depth in general from each new panel. I think Busby and others like her would be so much more valuable than perhaps better-known personalities.
In response to the 2019 Booker, a new award is launched: the Openly Rigged Literary Prize.“Openly” as the jury’s discussions are recorded verbatim and they manage to get in some nice digs at 2019 prize culture and various indie books and publishers discussed here (one sometimes needs to read between the lines but the Booker and Saltire Prize juries, Galley Beggar and Ezra Maas all get some friendly jokes at their expense as well as a kinder write-up of some other small indie press favourites):
https://minorliteratures.com/2019/12/...
If cattle can be awarded prizes, why shouldn’t writers?a true LOL moment.
No 2020 jury as of yet. Checking back at least to 2012 the jury has always been announced in December pre-Christmas and sometimes (particularly the name of the chair) even earlier.
Mod
Could it be a sponsorship problem? I wondered about the new sponsor after last year. Or maybe they're just going to change the dates? It will stay around, yes? Gosh, I hope the name doesn't change again. Keep we less-informed people posted please? Vielen Dank.
Found this on the wiki page for International Booker Prize:The 2020 prize will be judged by Ted Hodgkinson (Chair), Jennifer Croft, Valeria Luiselli, Jeet Thayil and Lucie Campos.
Mod
What I was saying about the panel being busy is because Luiselli is so in-demand (maybe someone on here said something about a more specific project), and Croft tweeted "I am never not translating The Books of Jacob" and in the same tweet that she was even doing so on Thanksgiving evening.
Okay, I saw Paul say no jury has been announced and your response, so I started searching.
OK, well - we all got to witness one of my little moments of panic about things that truly don't involve me at all in a way that demands my level of anxiety. I'm better now. Thanks, you all. It does make me wonder how on earth they'll read the books if they are so very busy. I do know something about a Luiselli project, but for the life of me, I can't remember even what it's about right now. I hope she'll write more books in English, but I'm guessing she'll be reading a ton before then.
I am feeling confused about this conversation but it's not a prize I normally follow closely so perhaps there are other related posts on another thread?
Ah, my fault, I thought I was in an MBI thread when I saw reference to the International.
Perhaps there is a delay due to extra forms for judges to sign saying they will follow the rules. :)
Mod
Now you mention it, this seems imaginable with the International, having seen stuff like that tweet. If they were trying to get an extra couple of weeks or so for reading, that would be understandable.
With the anglophone Booker perhaps Margaret Busby declined to take on the Chair role (she didn't seem very convinced at the prize dinner) and they've had to find a plan B.Or they are struggling to find jurors happy to sign a ferocious non-disclosure-and-guarantee-of-at-least-a-joint-prize-agreement to get their hands on a top secret ARC of The Mirror and the Light?
Not sure that works really as the publication date rather negates the need for an NDA/ARC (and the resulting blindness to literary merit that the resulting exclusivity seemed to produce in this year's jury). Also as you have pointed out all the evidence seems to point to this enthusiasm/blindness being a particular jury thing and very much not a Booker thing.I more wonder if they are thinking of dispensing with a jury. If The Mirror and the Light is anywhere near as good as its predecessors its hard to see why they need one in my view - or employ a jury but get them to read all 3 books plus Diarmid McCullough's non-fiction tome (that's pretty well my reading plans for February/early March).
The official take from the Prize itself last week (https://thebookerprizes.com/news/duck...)Spare a thought though for the Booker Prize judges of 2020. Both earlier volumes in the trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, won the prize so the pressure is well and truly on. Will they make her the only three-time winner in the prize’s history or will they buck the trend to inevitable howls of outrage? As conundrums go, it’s a whopper.
Surely Mantel’s impressive career is a more relevant factor than any perceived literary merit of the actual book. ;)
Tommi wrote: "Surely Mantel’s impressive career is a more relevant factor than any perceived literary merit of the actual book. ;)"Hilary Mantel seemed to come from nowhere. A plodding writer who had graced the Booker longlist only once (with Beyond Boring). Then Wolf Bore won - and I'm not sure it was a favourite to win - and suddenly everyone was saying that Hilary Mantel was some kind of literary titan. I am sure Bring Up The Boredom only won because of this sudden growth in reputation.
MisterHobgoblin wrote: "Tommi wrote: "Surely Mantel’s impressive career is a more relevant factor than any perceived literary merit of the actual book. ;)"Hilary Mantel seemed to come from nowhere. A plodding writer who..."
Oooh, you are bad ;)
Nadine wrote: "MisterHobgoblin wrote: "Tommi wrote: "Surely Mantel’s impressive career is a more relevant factor than any perceived literary merit of the actual book. ;)"Hilary Mantel seemed to come from nowher..."
(as in naughty)
Hey! I like Hilary Mantel! It’s from hanging off the bottom of the earth that has muddled MisterHobgoblin’s thinking. Although, I too have tried 3 times to read Wolf Hall and always lose interest in the same place. I do like her other books very much though. I was going to try again to read Wolf Hall all the way to the end, then Bring Up the Bodies, in time for The Mirror and the Light’s release.
Mod
What Hugh said.
Of course another trilogy by a two time winner (and who was the favourite to win in the year of Wolf Hall) is also out this year and just seen the first review. https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
Wolf Hall was the pre-award favourite with the bookies, indeed one of the hottest favourites ever, due to public support: William Hill reported it received 80% of all books). But 2 of the 5 judges did vote for Summertime. A more enlightened 2019 style jury might have split the prize. Mixed views on Mantel. She wasn’t really on my radar pre Wolf Hall (I knew of her but sound of the books didn’t appeal and as Misterhobgoblin pointed out her previous works hadn’t found much Booker success). I found Wolf Hall OK - looking at my rankings it is below average for Booker winners. Too much historical fiction style world building for my taste and I found it dull in parts. But Bring Up the Bodies worked much better for me as a character study.
I will read the new one but will be disappointed if there isn’t one - or ideally 6 - more interesting books for the judges to bring to our attention next year.
Gumble's Yard wrote: "Of course another trilogy by a two time winner (and who was the favourite to win in the year of Wolf Hall) is also out this year and just seen the first review. https://www.theguardian.com/books/..."
I got this for Christmas after having to give massive hints. John Self's review is more favourable. I have not read through the one you linked because I fear it may give too much away. I think John Self's was in The Spectator? I will look for it and post if I find it.
Summertime would have been a much better choice than Wolf Hall in my opinion.
Edit to add: John Self's review was in the 19th December Times, so behind a paywall.
2009 was one of the few years that I read the full longlist. I placed Wolf Hall seventh.
The two previous volumes in the Coetzee series are among my least favourite books ever but I will try the third. By contrast I loved Wolf Hall but then I love historical fiction particularly from the Tudor period
Guardian has the best-seller list in UK for 2019.https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
The joint Booker winning The Testaments is the highest literary fiction novel, 12th with 272k titles, just edging out Normal People and Eleanor Oliphant (which was 1st of all books in 2018 with an incredible 806k https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). Handmaid's Tale also in the top 50 as well as Circe and Transcription.
Girl Woman Other isn't in the top 50 but then the Booker comes late in the year and Milkman was just outside the top 100 last year but went on to sell loads. Indeed per the Irish Times Milkman is 82nd in the UK in 2019 with 115k copies sold (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...).
The Mookse and the Gripes
Books mentioned in this topic
New Daughters of Africa (other topics)The Prince of Homburg (other topics)
What's Bred in the Bone (other topics)
The Road (other topics)
The Far Field (other topics)
More...
One of the three was Lucy, whose book had been shortlisted for two national prizes and described as a masterpiece. My question was: ‘What else does a woman have to have to get you to vote for her?’”