Having had an evening to read over the various synopsis for this years longlisted titles, do I regret placing orders for all of them? Not at all - in fact the stories sound like a fairly mixed and interesting bunch. Three titles by authors who I have read before - Nicola Barker, Ian McEwan and Michael Redhill. Its always good to read familiar authors as you can judge how the novel rates compared to their previous efforts.
The books seem to cover quite a lot of distance both in time and geography - so I should get a pleasant mix of flavours. A couple of themes that seem to have appeared in a few novels of late - post 9/11 reflections (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and the disappearing child (What Was Lost).
Some of the novels seem quite lengthy, clocking in at over 400 pages, but a few are under that so hopefully it should balance out.
Initial impressions draw me towards Gifted and Animal’s People, and make me a little wary of The Gift of Rain and Consolation - but I remind myself that many a book turns out to be better than the cover blurb suggests.
Now I just need to tidy up a few loose ends with my current reading and wait for the first package to arrive.
4 comments:
Well, good luck on reading them. I'm almost halfway through my first in Mister Pip and it's clear to see why it's up their with the favourites.
Well I did a mildly obsessive-compulsive bit of quantity-surveying and worked out that the longlist totals about 4,800 pages. I've got through about 1,850 of those, so have about 3,000 to go. Help!
Please dont leave statistics like that, you'll frighten the most avid reader!
In that case I'm not saying that I read about one page per minute so it would take me 50 hours or there abouts to read them all...
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