Challenge: Battle of the Prizes, British Version

This challenge pits winners of the English Man Booker Prize against winners of the Scottish James Tait Black Memorial Prize in a British Version of the Battle of the Prizes. (Click here for the American Version.)

Does one prize have higher standards than the other? Pick better winners? Provide more reading entertainment or educational value? Maybe challenge participants will be able to answer these and more questions – maybe they will simply read three or four great books!

CHALLENGE ENDS JANUARY 31, 2011.  There is still time to join and plenty of time to finish if you are already participating. 

DETAILS

OPTION ONE: Chose three books that you have not read before:

1) One that won both the Booker and the James Tait Black prizes (here is the short list of double dippers);

2) One that won the Booker but not the James Tait Black (Booker winners are here); and

3) One that won the James Tait Black but not the Booker (James Tait Black winners are here).

OPTION TWO: For those who have already read all three of the double-dippers, or otherwise do not want to read one of those three, pick two Booker winners and two James Tait Black winners for a total of four books.

OFFICIAL RULES

• Read all books between February 1, 2010 and January 31, 2011.

• Overlap with other challenges is allowed -- and encouraged! The Complete Booker is a logical crossover. The great thing is, for those working on both these lists, completing the challenge means reading three books, but crossing four items off the lists.

• You do not have to commit to your choices now; you can change your mind about books at any time.

• Sign up here by leaving a link to your post in a comment, or the list of your three choices in the comment. I will add the links to the participant list in this post.

• As you progress, please let us know by leaving comments with links to progress reports and reviews. Reviews are not necessary, but encouraged. If you do not have a blog, put your reviews or reports in a comment on this post.
  

• You can copy and paste the button. Or, if you want me to send you the code, please leave a comment with an email and I will. I cannot figure out the fancy ways of giving directions. 
  

IDEAS

My three choices are:

1) G by John Berger for my double dipper choice;

2) The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch for my Booker winner; and

3) The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry for my James Tait Black winner.

I picked these three because they were all on my TBR shelf had been for a while.  As of December 1, I've finished The Secret Scripture and The Sea, the Sea.  The links to my reviews are in the list below.

PARTICIPANTS

Rose City Reader

chaotic compendiums 

Musings  (The first to complete the challenge -- congratulations!)

Oh, So Many Manias . . .  

Books in the City 

ExUrbanis

J.G. at Hotch Pot Cafe 

Birdie's Nest

REVIEWS

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on chaotic compendiums 

G by John Berger on Musings 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro on Birdie's Nest

Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien on Musings

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry here on Rose City Reader

Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby on Musings

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch here on Rose City Reader

20 Days to Christmas

21 Days to Christmas

Review of the Day: The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch is a novel about an aging theater icon who retires to the North Sea coast of England. It is a wonderful, fantastic story, about long-lasting attachments between people and the ideas that hold them together.

Murdoch is known as a philosophic writer and there is not a lot of action in this book. But she knows how to pace the story to keep it entertaining. She parses out what action there is, so just when it starts to seem too talky, something startling happens to capture the reader's attention.

Charles Arrowby was a famous playwright, actor, and director who, in retirement, seeks solitude in a funky, spooky old house perched on seaside cliffs. The story is told through his journal, which contains observations on his present as well as self-serving, only sometimes honest, reminiscences on his past.

While Charles seeks to put the theater life behind him, his life is theater. When former lovers, friends old and new, and even his Buddhist cousin turn up at his isolated retreat, Charles can’t help but manipulate and bully them into being a part of his one-man show. He treats the people in his life like he treated the audiences he mused on in this passage:

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied.

In the end, things do not work out as Charles planned, which only shows that Murdoch was much wiser than her narrator.

This is a wonderful, engrossing book, well deserving of its Booker prize.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book, or any other Iris Murdoch book, listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

The Sea, the Sea won the Booker prize in 1978. I am reading it for my  Battle of the Prizes, British Version challenge. It will also count as one of my Chunkster Challenge reads.

22 Days to Christmas

Literary Blog Hop: Pure Poetry!

The Blue Bookcase has started a "Literary Blog Hop" for blogs "that primarily feature reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion."

Each week, in addition to hopping around and visiting some terrific book blogs, participants answer a bookish question.  This week's question comes from Gary at Parrish Lantern:

What is your favorite poem and why?

Lucia answers this question very well for the Blue Bookcase team, managing to tie in Alexander Pope, Roald Dahl, and metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, before settling on one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Ah, well . . .

I can't really rise to that level, poetry troglodyte that I am. I did fancy John Dunne in my college days, but it didn't stick.  If my charming and omni-talented friend Kirsten Rian didn't email me a poem every Monday, I wouldn't recognize one if it jumped up and kissed me on the face.

I did read an epic poem this year. I read Seamus Heany's translation of Beowulf, but that was only because it was disguised as a story.  And even then, I would not have read it if it hadn't won a prize.

However, like Lucia, I'll pick a Shakespeare sonnet as my "favorite" because it is the only poem I ever managed to memorize.  It comes in handy at weddings. In fact, if you knew me in the late '80s or early '90s, check your wedding video, because after a few glasses of champagne, I was often likely to recite it for the bride and groom:

Shakespeare's 116th Sonnet

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

23 Days to Christmas

24 Days to Christmas

Time to start my blog advent calendar!

Teaser Tuesday: The Club Dumas

"For Dumas, the history of France was a rich source of material.  His was an extraordinary trick: he'd leave the frame alone but alter the picture, mercilessly plundering the treasure that was offered to him."

-- The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. This is great fun already and I've only just started it. I can't wait to sink into the story.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday

 

Knitting and Sundries is hosting Mailbox Monday in November. Thanks Julie!

Nothing came for me in the mail last week, but I did pick up a stack of books at the Grant High School annual used book sale.  All of them were in very good condition, mostly hardbacks, and only $2 each (because I went when they first opened -- they would have been $1 if I had waited until the afternoon, but these books may have been gone by then).

It's quite a mixed up mix of books:

Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (great cover!)



The Gate House by Nelson DeMille



A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion



Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy



Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (on the All-TIME 100 list)



In the Woods by Tana French (Edgar winner)

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Club Dumas

"The flash projected the outline of the hanged man on the wall."

-- The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

I have high expectations that this will be a fun book, although I know nothing about it besides what I read on the cover -- that it is a bookish mystery involving a rare manuscript of The Three Muscateers.  Someone (I can't remember who) gave it to me because my last name is Dumas.

I wanted to kick of the Christmas season with a book I read for pure enjoyment. Come the New Year, I'll have the energy for "important" books, or books I feel like I should read. But during Christmas, I like to read for cosy entertainment.

Although, this one will count for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge, so I will accomplish something.

Book Notes: The Night Gardener

The Night Gardener is the only George Pelacanos book that I've read. It has a good story, especially if you like your mysteries to have a hard edge.

But there is one thing that is so distracting that I am having a hard time enjoying the book, and it is this:

Ramone,
Romeo,
Rhonda,
Ramirez,
Rudy,
Red,
Rogers,
Randolph (aka Randy),
Regina,
Robert,
Ronald,
Richard,
Richards,
Raymond,
Raynella, and
Ray

Those are all characters in the book! Apparently Pelacanos's random name generator got stuck on R. The hero goes by Ramone, a main bad guy is Romeo; the hero's wife is Regina, his partner is Rhonda. It is really confusing. And now I am more consumed with finding "R" names than I am with the plot.

Shopping Day: Books & More

The turkeys have all marched on, so it is time to start Christmas shopping.

For those here in Portland, here are a couple of fun idea to help avoid the mall:

• Friday & Saturday, 10 am -6 pm, Second Glance Books is having its Annual Holiday Sale & Open House. Everything in the store is at least 10% off. All holiday books, children's books and cook books are 20% off. Bargain books are 50% off the clearance price. There are refreshments and a chance to win a Second Glance Books gift certificate.

• Today only, the Multnomah County Librarys' Title Wave Used Bookstore is having a sale with 55% off its' usual low prices. All money goes to the Multnomah County Library. 

• My new favorite non-book store, ink & peat, is open early today and will be festive all weekend. Click the picture to see a bigger, readable version. Remember to print this to get 10% off.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Teaser Tuesday: The Night Gardener

He used her credit card to buy gas for the hack and also for cash advances to buy more rock.  He stayed high and without a plan, except to wait for the police, who he knew would eventually come.

-- The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos.

I'm having a hard time getting absorbed by this book. It is hard for me to go from the fluid elegance of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea , to hard boiled crime and Pelecanos's lickity split cadence.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday

 

Knitting and Sundries is hosting Mailbox Monday in November. Thanks Julie!

One book came in the mail for me last week. OSU Press sent me a book I've had my eye on. I am looking forward to this one, in part because my parents live in Oregon's High Desert.



Where the Crooked River Rises: A High Desert Home by Ellen Waterston. 

Announcement: Portland Used Book Sale

The annual Grant High School Used Book Sale is this week. Donated books are for sale to raise money for the school library.


Here are the details:

Location:

Grant High School

2245 NE 36th Avenue, Room 130

Portland, Oregon

Dates and Times:

November 22nd from 8 am to 8 pm

November 23rd from 8 am to 6 pm

Prices:

$2/book from 8 am to noon on the 22nd

$1/book from noon to 8 pm on the 22nd and all day on the 23rd

Review of the Day: The I Hate to Cook Book

The 50th Anniversary edition of Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book is welcomed re-issue of a charming and funny cookbook classic.

Bracken wrote humorous newspaper and magazine pieces -- and several books -- about cooking and housekeeping. She clearly had a huge influence on the housewives of my mother's generation, since my friends and I grew up with meals I now recognize from The I Hate to Cook Book: pot roast made with dried onion soup mix, a "Mexican" casserole made with taco chips, Turkey Tettrazini, etc.

These recipes are still great, in that church supper kind of way that 1960s cookbooks tend to have -- lots of condensed cream of mushroom soup (known as "the casserole maker" at my house) and things served on rice. But the best parts are Bracken's funny asides and tips, like this one for making "Indonesian Curry":

. . . Simmer it all from half and hour to an hour, while the rice cooks.

This gives you a nice breather. You may now put your feet up and have a highball, or else you may dirty up a lot of little dishes with

chopped peanuts
chopped green onions
chopped almonds
toasted coconut . . . .

to serve as side boys with your curry. Take your choice. 

Any recipe than suggests a highball during cooking time is worth the shelf space.  Another recipe instructs: "Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink."  It's the Mad Men of cookbooks.

What seems funny now is that Bracken wrote for an audience of housewives looking for an excuse to cook quick, easy meals -- they hated to cook.  Today, women (and men) don't need an excuse for wanting a homecooked meal that doesn't take hours to prepare.  This is still the book for them.

WEEKEND COOKING

Hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Literary Blog Hop: I'm Not Making This Up!

The Blue Bookcase has started a "Literary Blog Hop" for blogs "that primarily feature reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion."

Each week, in addition to hopping around and visiting some terrific book blogs, participants answer a bookish question.  This week's question is:

Is there such a thing as literary non-fiction? If so, how do you define it? Examples?

Connie answered "yes" on behalf of the Blue Bookcase team and makes the case for Maya Angelou as a master of literary non-fiction.

I have to keep my answer short this week (compared to my Finnegans Wake diatribe last week) because I am in a frenzy of pre-holiday prep work this weekend. So I will say this:

Yes, "literature" is not confined to fiction and poetry.  Non-fiction can be, and historically has been, literature.  In my mind, I count any non-fiction as literature if it is well written, expresses ideas as well as facts, and has some lasting value -- either because if its historical significance or because the ideas still resonate.

I've read quite a bit of non-fiction this year, not all of which I would count as literary, even though they may have been entertaining or useful.  Those I would put in the literary category include the following:

• Another Way the River Has by Robin Cody (reviewed here);
  
• Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (reviewed here);  
• The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White (reviewed here); 
• The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling Through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World (reviewed here);
• My Life in France by Julia Child (reviewed here)
• The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby (reviewed here); 
• Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed here); and
• A Year in the World by Frances Mayes (reviewed here).

These include travel, essays, memoirs, biography, and straightforward non-fiction.  I definitely think history and historical biography can be literary, but I don't seem to have read any this year, although I am halfway through Antonia Frasier's biography of Marie Antoinette, and that definitely counts as literature.

I look forward to reading other people's answers to this question. It is another interesting one.

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Joy Luck Club

"The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum."

-- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.

Amy Tan is one of those authors who is so in my consciousness that I think I have read more of her books than I have. This is probably her most famous, but I am just now getting around to reading it.

How Cool!

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon won the National Book Award last night.

I just got this book last week. I feel so lucky. And so cutting edge!

I want to go read it right now.

Review of the Day: Titus Alone

Titus Alone is the final volume of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy about the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In Titus Groan, the eponymous first volume, Peake created the elaborate world inside castle of Gormenghast and introduced readers to the extended Groan family and their court of retainers and hangers-on. Volume two, Gormenghast, picked up when Titus was a schoolboy, allowing Peake to focus on the antics of a mangy band of professors responsible for Titus’s education.

This last volume is not really an extension of the glorious saga of the first two books, but its own story of Titus’s adventures after he leaves Gormenghast. It is much shorter than the first two, giving Peake less room to develop the intricate descriptions and side stories that make the others so seductive.

The plot moves forward in fits and starts as Titus tries to find his way back to Gormenghast, or at least back to surefooted sanity. There are gaps in the narrative and some characters disappear quite abruptly.  And the story is emotionally ragged as Titus and several other characters are, for no clear reason, quick to anger and violence.  Scenes go instantly from potentially humorous to disastrous, and then the story moves off in a different direction, leaving the reader struggling to catch up.   

Overall, Titus Alone lacks the polish and delightful detail of the first volumes, which makes it a letdown.

OTHER REVIEWS

Bibliofreak

See also, The Voice of the Heart: The Working of Mervyn Peake's Imagination
by G. Peter Winnington

Judging from other reviews I’ve read, I’m not alone in my assessment. But there are some fans who very much enjoyed the third volume and make a case for its literary and entertainment value.

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

My review of Titus Groan is here. My review of Gormenghast is here.

The Gormenghast Trilogy shows up, in whole or in part, on Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels and on the BBC's Big Read list.

Teaser Tuesday: The Sea, the Sea

"At that moment I heard a terrible sound, a sound which in fact I had been dreading ever since I embarked upon my perilous adventure.  Hartley upstairs had suddenly started screaming and banging the door."

-- The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, a novel about an aging playwright/director/actor who retires to the North Sea coast of England. This teaser makes it sound a little more thrilling than it is. It is a wonderful, fantastic story, but more about people and ideas than scary adventure. Murdoch knows how to pace the story, though. Just when it starts to seem too talky, something startling happens, like in this scene.

I love this book, even though it is taking me a while to read. I enjoy it so much that I don't want it to end.  (Also, I took a break to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I reviewed here.)

The Sea, the Sea won the Booker prize in 1978. I am reading it for my  Battle of the Prizes, British Version challenge. It will also count as one of my Chunkster Challenge reads.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday

 

Knitting and Sundries is hosting Mailbox Monday in November. Thanks Julie!

My mailbox overfloweth last week. Actually, only the first three came in the mail. But I did a little library book shop hopping when I was out in the suburbs and found several books I'd had an eye out for or at least caught my eye.



Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (a National Book Award finalist)



The Hanging Tree: A Starvation Lake Mystery by Bryan Gruley (from the Internet Review of Books, for review)



Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris (my first order from Book Depository)



Walk There! 50 Treks In and Around Portland and Vancouver by Laura O. Foster (a tiny book with a big picture)



Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine by Jochen Hemmleb (for Hubby, because they may have to eat the sled dogs -- his high water mark for literature)



The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope (I'm going to tackle the series, but first I have to figure out which ones I own)



Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer (it caught my fancy)



The Red Scream by Mary Willis Walker (Edgar winner)



Brazil by John Updike (because I am working on reading all of his books)



The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (on the All-TIME 100 Top Novels list)



Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope (I know nothing about this author, but this is the second of her books that I've bought in the last month. Why? I don't know why they have been appealing to me.)

And because I have been on a big mystery kick, I got a stack of pocket paperback mysteries:



Knockdown by Dick Francis (I am tearing through his books these days)



The James Joyce Murder by Amanda Cross (seemed appropriate after my Finnegans Wake diatribe the other day)



Some Buried Ceasar by Rex Stout (I just started the Nero Wolf series)



The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook (another Edgar winner)



A Venetian Reckoning and Acqua Alta by Donna Leon (because I read the first book in this series, Death at La Fenice years ago and always meant to read the rest)