How many Booker winning novels have you read?

I’d never heard of JG Farrell either, but the colonialist stuff is hugely rtmi, so I’m getting his two books and The Line of Beauty

Go on then, I'll admit it - zero. Although I have read 9 Hugo winners from over the same time period, so that's something.

eleven or twelve - i can't remember if i read both of the hilary mantel books or just the first one.
i've read "troubles" and "the siege of krishnapur" and thought they were both great.

i can't remember if i read both of the hilary mantel books or just the first one

Was Anne Boelyn alive or dead at the end? (Apologies for the spoiler for everyone else, but she gets beheaded).

Fuck you DC! I'll never read them now!

Nah I should, and will

i really can't recall, it was too long ago. feel free to round my total down to 11 for purposes of booker cred points

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/november/letter-from-america

It isn’t so much that Scotland has achieved a grown-up reckoning with its social history (warts, booze, paedophiles and all), as that these wounds have become a source of cultural and political capital. Can't wait to visit, on the way to Vatican City! Classick clickbait, and of course no consid of the text atall; has he even read it.

Think it was more a report focusing on Scotland attitudes to it's literary culture.

Yeah, but I read it as tainting the book by association with/"enabling" those people over there, who seem reduced: is it not possible that some may be nationalist significantly in terms of being anti-Brexit, anti-Tory for considerations that can be concerning beyond those who want to wear haggis and eat kilts and etc.? I mean, since he brought it up. The premise (they're going from one extreme to another) is worth developing, but stopping where he does seems like a dick move.

This whole thing of reduction, conflation, sideways inflation is irritating: like on ilx, we'll soon see the annual kneejerk reaction against pollwinners because those people over there like them for the rong reasons/so much/at all, also on ilm I've seen Cardi B compared to Trump because she brags, a New Yorker writer compared Post Malone to Trump, said he pretty much is Trump, rather than another miserable little parasite (which he even looks like he knows he is, on some level)

Nothing vs. you for your choice of link, but that's my caffeinated think.

I must admit I have prejudged this book. it does sound like frank mccourt transposed. social realism in thatcherite Glasgow does sound on the nose and not necessarily what I want from a contemporary Scottish novel. having said that I really wish that it wasn't made to stand as an artifact of cultural devolution and in a normal country you would be able to write a grim social realist novel without having that kind of baggage attached.

I know I read Life of Pi and Bone People
THink I may have read The English Patient, know i saw the film or it might stick out better but i do think I read the book too.
THink I read Oscar and Lucinda if it's the one about the glass house on a boat, saw film too. Read a few of his around then

have a few of the others of the original cited list lying around the flkat unread.

& have read Wolf Hall, should have read Bring Out the Bodies by now since I found the prose of Wolf Hall really delicious.

only just realising that Bone People was a Booker winner looked like an interesting read when I found it i a Dublin charity or cheap book shop[ in the early 90s. Liked it at the time. Maori interactions and things, I think a maori woman trying to make it i more Western society, but that was like 28 years since i read it.

I've read 15 of that list.

Stand outs would be:
The Ghost Road
Moon Tiger
Disgrace
The Life & Times of Michael K
Hotel Du Lac

I loved The Bone People at the time but I'd be terrified of re-reading it. I went with my now wife to Keri Hulme's home, er, town, when I was in NZ. Okarito, population 8*, on a lonely fly-blown tear of the west coast. We got dropped off up the road and walking in, a fella stopped in his car and offered us a lift. He said he was 'having a bath' that night, in his garden under the stars and we'd be welcome to come along. We didn't go and I think about it all the time.

*she wasn't there, so population 7, I guess.

John Banville, winner of the 2005 Booker Prize, has suggested that he could not win it now because he is a straight, white male https://t.co/hNT70dug1Z

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) December 1, 2020

well i for one am shocked that Banville would come out with this

I suggest you are a prick and wouldn't win it because everyone has seen through your overwritten shite.

i like some of his overwritten shite but yeah, huge prick energy

Also he's pissed away the last 20 years writing dour, pointless and tedious crime novels, plush a cash-in fake Raymond Chandler, so he's not exactly churning out the masterpieces these days.

Hotel du Lac is lovely! A small, extremely earnest thing ('somewhat Sparklike but more modern and lost' was my immediate response, which also puts it in Rhys territory tbh) that nonetheless pulls a number of sly games en route to terminus. Probably fits in second behind TLOB for me now, a book to which this makes a decent counterpoint, perhaps.

I've read

2004 The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
2002 Life of Pi by Yann Martel
2000 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
1999 Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
1992 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (co-winner)
1989 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1986 The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

And that's it. I didn't adore any of them, really... the Coetzee in particular seemed to have a thesis that I instinctively thought was weird and bad even when I read it in my early 20s.

Exception to this, of course, was "The Line Of Beauty", which I'm unashamed to state is one of my favourite novels of all time... not just as an effective work of AIDS-related art, and a commentary on Thatcherism, but such an effective skewering of the bourgeois shittiness of "gay" on the whole.

Yeah it really stands clear, my previous post notwithstanding

Since 2005 I've increased my tally from one to six and I thought most of them were fine, but the fact of their Booker Prize was totally irrelevant to my choosing to read them. My participation in I Love Books has been far more influential in leading me to good books.

Re what Banville said above, just in the last ten years Howard Jacobson, Julian Barnes, and George Saunders have all won. Is he mad that three women and a gay man won in a row after Saunders?

the Coetzee in particular seemed to have a thesis that I instinctively thought was weird and bad even when I read it in my early 20s.

― what's fgti up to these days? nothing. she's fake (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, 7 September 2021 23:00 (ye

What's the thesis you didn't like?