Man Booker Prize Longlist 2010

Here, in alphabetical order, is the longlist, just announced -

Peter Carey - Parrot and Oliver in America
Emma Donoghue – Room
Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal
Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room
Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question*
Andrea Levy - The Long Song
Tom McCarthy - C
David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Lisa Moore - February*
Paul Murray - Skippy Dies*
Rose Tremain – Trespass
Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap*
Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky*

It is a good list. I have read about half of them and next on my list is Room (I started with the Rose Tremain, which I thought excellent). These prizes are a strange business, with books suddenly being yoked together, the barely comparable being compared. Books with asterisks are available in paperback.

Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes is one of the best books I have read this year and I am delighted that Edmund de Waal will be talking about it for The Woodstock Bookshop as part of the Independent Woodstock Literature Festival on Saturday 18 September at 7pm in the Methodist Church. Ceramicist Edmund de Waal traces the history of his family through ownership of a collection of netsuke inherited from his great uncle: the story is fascinating and he writes as well as he throws pots.
Booking will open shortly and I urge you to book in advance. I am not alone in loving it - the book has had great reviews (it was described by Frances Wilson in the Sunday Times as 'a work of rare and sustained brilliance...nobody since Lorna Sage in Bad Blood has shown so well how a memoir can overflow with riches and yet remain light, fragile, compact. Like the netsuke themselves, this book is impossible to put down. You have in your hands a masterpiece.' The review in the Economist was equally ecstatic: 'From a hard and vast archival mass of journals, memoirs, newspaper clippings and art-history books, Mr de Waal has fashioned, stroke by minuscule stroke, a book as fresh with detail as if it had been written from life, and as full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend'). I imagine tickets will sell out fast.

Jo Shapcott and Daljit Nagra

We are joining forces with Tower Poetry to host an evening of poetry at The Woodstock Arms on Wednesday August 25th at 8pm. Tickets £4, students free, MUST be booked in advance. More information soon!

Independent Woodstock Literature Festival 2010

After a very busy June (with visits by Alexandra Shulman and Robert Sackville-West) we are not holding talks in July and August but are hosting a poetry reading (see above) and will take part in the literature festival by hosting two authors. The festival will be held in Woodstock and Blenheim Palace from September 15-19 this year - details available soon.
Our programme of talks resumes in October with Jane Gardam who is coming to speak on Tuesday 19 October, by which time her book The Man in the Wooden Hat will be available in paperback. It is the wonderful companion volume to Old Filth and tells the story of Elisabeth, Filth's wife. Do try and re-read Old Filth over the summer if you're planning to come to the talk, and get hold of The Man in the Wooden Hat when it comes out in September (anyone buying the book from me will be entitled to a free place at the talk). The books are entirely separate but The Man... tells Elisabeth's story in a way that makes you instantly want to re-read Old Filth.
Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. He is sent to England from India as a child and finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the Bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions ...How Elisabeth turns into Betty, and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or swept up by caddish Veneering, make for a page-turning plot, full of surprises, revelations and humour. Jane Gardam is one of our best novelists.

Knole Talk Tuesday 29 June

Robert Sackville-West's talk about Inheritance, his book on Knole and the Sackvilles, starts at 7.30pm and will be held at The Methodist Church.

Judging the Orange Prize

Well, as you can see, Orange judge and Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman showed her enthusiasm for independent bookshops by coming to talk to us in the Methodist Church about the process of judging the Orange Prize for Fiction. Despite what most people would consider an unbelievably hectic job for the past eighteen years - and a teenage son - she reads a lot too. We were all impressed by her stoicism and endurance in having read so many books in such a short period of time while she was selecting books for the Orange longlist and shortlist ('And then I caught flu which was quite a relief because I managed to read three books while I was recovering!') and it was interesting to hear her talk about the titles that didn't make the shortlist as well as those that did. The talk was followed by questions during which she and the audience agreed on the dearth of well-written books about contemporary middle-class life - a modern Jane Austen, for example - and shared Daisy Goodwin's view that there was rather too much misery in the books submitted. The Woodstock Bookshop is currently compiling a list of amusing or even funny books - any suggestions please to info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk ...

Independent Booksellers' Week

As you can see below, we are starting Independent Booksellers' Week with a flourish - and on Monday 14 June our main event of the week is the talk by Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue magazine since 1992, who is coming to discuss the Orange shortlist and prizewinner. Alexandra has been one of the judges this year and will tell us something about why and how the shortlist and winning title were chosen from the vast number of books submitted for the prize. Please note that this talk begins at the earlier than usual time of 7pm.

I think the shortlist this year is excellent - I have read most of them and although I sometimes feel weak in the face of the huge number of book awards and prizes each year and slightly sceptical about some of the winners, I think the Orange Prize has a good history of rewarding excellent writers - Marilynne Robinson, Rose Tremain, Kate Grenville, Linda Grant, Anne Michaels, Helen Dunmore, to mention just a few of them.

Martin Amis was speaking at the Hay festival recently, where he complained that only unenjoyable books win awards: "There was a great fashion in the last century, and it's still with us, of the unenjoyable novel. And these are the novels which win prizes, because the committee thinks, 'Well it's not at all enjoyable, and it isn't funny, therefore it must be very serious...It all started with [Samuel] Beckett, I think. It was a kind of reasonable response to the horrors of the 20th century - you know, 'No poetry after Auschwitz'. But I think it's footling and it's a mistake and it's a false lead...You look back at the great writers in the English canon, and the American, and they are all funny...The reason for that is that life is funny. It's horrible, and there are disgusting atrocities et cetera et cetera, but we all know that life is very funny - that's its nature."

Martin Amis has never won a major prize but he has a point - I often find it hard to think of funny books. The Orange prize shortlist - and the longlist, too - if not wildly funny, is certainly enjoyable and I am looking forward to hearing what Alexandra has to say about how on earth the judges choose between books as different as Black Water Rising and The Very Thought of You...