Every year, I try to keep up with the major book prize winners. I have not cracked open any of the Pulitzer or National Book Award winners recently (but The Goldfinch is on my list, I swear!), but I’ve done okay with the Man Booker Prize winners (and I don’t get any chance to read most of the finalists–time is not on my side, sadly). I read 2013’s winner The Luminaries this year and loved it. So when this year’s winner was also an ANZAC […]
Best. Title. Ever.
The award for the best title of 2014 has to go to Karen Joy Fowler, don’t we think? It is the reason I even gave this a second glance, and then the deliciously cryptic description hooked me right in. In reviewing this wonderful book, I’m likely going to get spoiler happy, so if you don’t know the big reveal of the novel and don’t want to before you pick it up, stop reading now. Still here? Well ok then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. […]
I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….
So here’s the thing. I had been gagging to read Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came To The End, since it was published to near universal acclaim a few years ago. I finally got round to starting it at the end of March this year and hated it so much that I had to give up after 100 pages as I just couldn’t face reading another word. I hated all the characters and their tiresome situations. Having now read his latest, it affirms my suspicion about why […]
Can you ever be just whelmed?
So this year, I’m not doing the whole Booker Prize Longlist. After last year’s epic slog and some disappointments of a very large magnitude, I approached this year’s list with a more discerning eye. I immediately discounted three of the titles, while noting with varying degrees of smuggery that I owned another two of the list and had already readone of them. A fourth title, this one, was also sitting on one of the bookshelves in the flat, but it didn’t belong to me. It […]