Another Monday is upon us… *yawn*.
Fortunately, this week should be a bit more exciting than most: October is the month of book awards!
- October 6th – 2009 Man Booker Prize Winner Announced
- October 8th – Nobel Prize for Literature Announced
- October 13th – 20 Finalists for the National Book Award are Announced (come on guys – you couldn’t come up with something snappier???)
- Also, we missed the Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist (thank you to KevinfromCanada for making us aware of Canada’s prize. It seems all of North America needs to work on marketing our literary awards).
The winners of The National Book Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize will be announced in November.
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As for my personal reading – I’m hoping to post reviews for Dan Simmon’s Drood and Amphibian by Carla Gunn this week. Both were great, though very different, books.
I’m in the middle of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, which is better than even I had hoped (and I had some high hopes for this after reading Oryx & Crake). I know the reviews keep saying that this book can be read as a stand alone, and in its way it can. But I very much recommend reading Oryx & Crake, either before or after The Year of the Flood, because it adds another layer to the story that it would be a shame to miss.
Also, I’ve just begun reading Eating Air by Pauline Melville. (This is a review copy I requested from the publisher, Telegram Books). It’s out in the UK, but I have no idea when it will be released in the States. I’ve been picking it up and carrying it around all week because it makes me so happy. The dust jacket is beautiful and the book itself is the perfect proportions (I’m a big fan of short, squat books). And the writing is stunning! Hopefully, I’ll have a review up soon. For now, here’s a teaser from the book’s first two paragraphs –
I want to tell the story of these extraordinary events without drawing attention to myself or implicating myself in any way. I was involved only in the most tangential way, I can assure you – more by association than anything else. These days it is possible to be locked up for even hinting that terrorism can be glorious or for having the wrong friends and courts don’t take into account the law of unintended consequences. So it’s sotto voce for me. To be on the safe side I have to present the truth as fiction.
I prefer to write in cafés. I move around. The Head in the Sand café in Camden Town is my current haunt. Every morning the proprietor brings me a glass of rum steeped in hot peppers, a black coffee, two dishes of grilled peanuts and my newspaper. I wear dark glasses with the right, coffin-shaped lens knocked out to make sure, in these lean times, that no-one steals my food. The place is a little down-at-heel but I like the sludge-olive décor and those trendily scuffed wooden floors, bentwood chairs and the menu chalked on a blackboard behind the counter. Who am I? I come from Surinam. My complexion is cinnamon. I am as slim as Barack Obama. My style is that of a graveyard dandy; black hat, black coat and a silver cane – it’s possible to dress like this in London without attracting undue attention. Oh… and I think highly of myself which is always good for one’s health…
Please don’t forget to go to J. Kaye’s Book Blog to see what the rest of her friends & followers are reading. Happy Monday! *strrrretttch*
