How many Booker winning novels have you read?

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?