The finalists for this year’s Man Booker Prize were announced last week. They are:

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)

The shortlist of six authors will be announced on Sept. 6, and the winner announced October 18.

So far I’ve only read The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt, which I loved. You can read my review at http://2manybooks2littletime.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt-had-me-at-hello/

Have you read any of the rest of these? What did you think?

Not my own secret - lifted from Post Secret.com

Have you ever heard of the Post Secret website? It’s a website where people send in postcards confessing their secrets. Some are funny, some gross, some just heartbreaking, but it’s an interesting concept – a public, but anonymous, place to get things off your chest.

Well, they say that confession is good for the soul, so I’m going to post my secret right here, for all of you readers.

I like to read cheesey crime novels.

There, I’ve said it, and I feel better already. I know that I profess to be a “discriminating reader”, and most of the time I am. But sometimes I just can’t control myself, and I have to read Michael Connelly, or Dennis Lehane. Once I even sank to reading Ann Rule. But – I swear – I’ve never touched a Janet Evanovich!!

And yes, the reason I’m writing this post is that I’m in the middle of a Michael Connelly binge and don’t have a “better” book to blog about.

Do you have a deep, dark secret about your reading habits that you’d like to share? Go ahead – you’re among friends!

Yes, it’s true that I’m REALLY still reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, but with the HBO mini-series “Mildred Pierce” beginning this weekend, I’ve decided to leave the physical carnage of McCarthy’s Old West for the emotional carnage of James M Cain’s 1930′s Southern California. I hope I can stay one step ahead of HBO.

Did anyone else decide this is the perfect time for a little noir?

In yesterday’s Guardian Book Blog, Chris Power poses the question, “Is the short story really the novel’s poor relation?” Power goes on to defend the short story, saying:

The short story, by contrast, acknowledges the vastness and diversity of life by the very act of focusing on one small moment or aspect of it. The story is small precisely because life is so big. Novelists are expected to tie up loose ends, whereas the short story writer can make a virtue of ambiguity.

I love the short story for many of the reasons Power discusses – the focus, the intimacy, the brevity. I sit in awe of those who can communicate so much in so few words.

As I thought about Power’s post, it caused me to reflect on some of my favorite short stories. Here’s my Top Ten, although they aren’t listed in any particular order – I think they’re all fantastic!

1. “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien

2. “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker

3. “Nawabdin Electrician,” by Daniyal Mueenudin

4. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor

5. “Orientation,” by Daniel Orozco

6. “The Book of Sand,” by Jorge Luis Borges

7. “Brownies,” by ZZ Packer

8. “Summer, Boys,” by Ethan Rutherford

9. “Where I’m Calling From,” by Raymond Carver

10. “Free Radicals,” by Alice Munro

What short stories do you love?

I hate to say it, but I give up! I’ve been trying to get through this book for weeks now but, for some reason, I just never want to read it. I’m somewhat curious to know how it turns out, but apparently not curious enough to actually dedicate the time to finish it.

I put it on my Kindle after reading a brief review in The New York Times. Sansom is a new author to me (not a new author to those who read historical crime novels, as he has many books in print). I liked the aspect of solid historical research combined with a tight plot, which is what the review indicated I would find in this book. And I did. What I didn’t realize was how much the attention to minute historical detail – whether or not it advanced the story – would drag down the plot.

So – I’m not going to rate this book, and I’m not going to finish it, either. But  it has got me thinking – how do you know it’s time to give up on a book? I know people who insist on finishing any book they start. I know other’s who give it a certain amount of time, read a certain number of pages, or set other criteria for how much to devote to a book that’s not working for them. What’s your policy?

I am getting a lot of hits on my posting on “Nawabdin Electrian” from Daniyal Mueenudin’s Other Rooms, Other Views.

I’m not complaining, but can anyone tell me why? Is it being taught in schools, or getting publicity somewhere?

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic story and deserves to be read. But I have gotten more ongoing hits on this particular post than any others, and I’m curious to know why.

 This quiz has been making the rounds. If you’re not on Facebook, you may have fun completing it and sharing it on your blog. Also might remind you of some books you’d like to add to your TBR list!

Here are the instructions:

 Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.  

 I have read 60. Parts of 9 more. There are 4 I’ve never heard of.  Looks like I have some more reading to do!

  1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 

 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

 6 The Bible

 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 

 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 

 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 

 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 

 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (at least twice)

 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

 34 Emma -Jane Austen

 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

 36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

 40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

 52 Dune – Frank Herbert

 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

 75 Ulysses – James Joyce

 76 The Inferno – Dante 

 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

 78 Germinal – Emile Zola

 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

 80 Possession – AS Byatt

 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 

 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

 87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl   

 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2010 National Book Award:

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Read the New York Times Review

______________________________________________

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Read the Kirkus Review

____________________________________________________

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Read the Los Angeles Times Review

_______________________________________________

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Read the New York Times Review

_______________________________________________

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Read the International Examiner Review

The big news, of course, is the omission of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom from this list. Also missing are Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes) and The Imperfectionists (Tom Rachman),  two other well-reviewed best-selling titles. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more interesting that two of these nominated books are virtually unknown and unreviewed. Is the absence of Freedom from this list a matter of sour grapes on the part of the reviewers (Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, and Carolyn See) or do the more obscure titles selected have greater literary value? I haven’t read any of the nominees, so I’m not really in a position to say.

Have you read any? What are your thoughts? Speaking for myself, I’m interested in getting my hands on them to find out!

In today’s New York Times, Michael Cunningham writes a great piece about the intricacies of translation and the relationship between reader and writer. He begins with the well-known opener of Moby Dick: Call me Ishmael. He breaks down the phonetics – the “music” of the sounds and candence. He points out that “Call me Arthur,” or “Call me Bob” just wouldn’t be the same. He remarks on the confidence and force that the narrator demonstrates in this line.

This got me thinking about other great openers:

- “They shoot the white girl first.” (Paradise, Toni Morrison)

- “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”  (Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf)

- “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” (Waiting, Ha Jin)

- “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey)

It’s hard to argue that few first lines can beat “Call me Ishmael,” but they can certainly make or break a reader’s engagement in a novel. All of the openers I’ve quoted above made an impression on me that pulled me into the story immediately. They’ve stayed with me over the years because each contains so much information in so few words.

What are  your favorite openers? What does it take for you to consider an opener “great”?

Winner will be announced Tuesday, October 12

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Picador – Pan Macmillan)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books – Grove Atlantic)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Review -
Headline Publishing Group)

Tom McCarthy C (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

For full information go to http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1451

Have you read any of these? Any opinions about which to read and/or which should win?