2023 Booker Nominations (Part 4)

I had planned to watch the Booker Prize announcement live on YouTube this afternoon but because of its timing in the Houston area, I'm going to be watching the end of the Houston Texans vs. the Jacksonville Jaguars football game about the time it all begins. Then, the time required to work my way out of the stadium and make the drive home pretty much guarantees that I'll miss out on the live Booker experience this year. 

At this point, I'm still expecting that The Bee Sting will win, but the more I read from the Booker list, the more I realize that the competition is pretty stiff this year. Since my last note on the Booker, I've unexpectedly gotten my hands on a copy of Pearl by Siân Hughes, and even though it didn't make the shortlist, I'm quite enjoying Pearl - at least to its halfway point. 

Pearl is a coming of age story about a little girl whose mother goes missing when Marianne is only eight years old. Now it's just Marianne, her baby brother, and a father who has to figure out a way to care for his children while he struggles with simply keeping a roof over all their heads. Marianne is the novel's narrator, and her effort to reconcile her childhood memories of her mother's disappearance with what she learns as she gets older makes for compelling reading. 

I also spent a considerable amount of time with the Martin Macinnes entry titled The Ascension (150 pages worth, actually) last week. And since I found myself still waiting for something interesting (to me) to happen, I gave up on this one. The Ascension stood out to me mainly because it is science fiction, and that has to be fairly rare thing for the Booker Prize lists. I suspect I'm missing something here, but just couldn't make myself stick it out long enough to maybe find out what that might be. 

Having now read four of the nominees, most of another, and abandoned two (one at fifty pages, the other at 150 pages), my personal ranking of those seven looks like this:

• The Bee Sting -  Paul Murray
• If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery
• Western Lane - Chetna Maroo 
• Pearl - Siân Hughes
• Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry
• A Spell of Good Things - Ayòbámi Adébáyò
• The Ascension - Martin Macinnes 

I started Paul Harding's This Other Eden yesterday evening but I haven't read many pages yet. I do hear that its main mixed-race characters tend to be so exaggerated in an attempt to make them seem superior despite their isolation and lack of education that they lose their effectiveness. That's not an obvious flaw early on, but I can see how that might eventually wear on the reader over time if true. It is set in 1912 on an isolated island off the coast of Maine. 

So this brings me to seven books ranked, two on hand (The Other Eden and The House of Cards), two still unpublished in the US (Prophet Song and All the Little Bird-Hearts), and two still on library-hold (How to Build a Boat and Study for Obedience).