Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Everisto
Snowflake AZ - Marcus Sedgwick
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
Happy advent people. Got some biggies in the reading bucket this month, Booker Winners a-go-go. Check me out.
But let's start with the YA. We are both more comfortable starting there. I say YA, Marcus Sedgewick is very much at the literary end of YA. Snowflake AZ was a curios book. It was about something that a cynic like me sneers at, but managed to do it in a way that stopped me sneering. Which is no mean feat.
I got George Saunders the wrong way round. If I had my ear to the pulse I would have read this before Lincoln in the Bardo, rather than a year or so after. Ho hum. I always struggle with short stories and whilst some of these were ace. It generally came across as a smorgasbord of good ideas, rather than a coherent meal.
Girl, Woman, Other could have beem the same. It wasn't. It was brilliant. You don't need me to tell you that, she's just won the Booker. Oh no wait, Booker prize winners often come across as more pretentious than fun - this might be the best Booker winner I've read.
And that includes English Patient. I know it's a modern classic, but I just didn't care about any of the characters. And call me old-fashioned but I find that pretty important in a book
That and believability. It felt like When We Were Orphans got bored of being believable at about the half way point. It then became silly and I wanted it to be over.
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