I just can’t contain myself, I have to tell you. I’m reading the funnest book right now. (What? You say “funnest” isn’t a word?) It won the Booker Prize in 2013, it’s more than 800 pages long, it’s written in a high-Victorian/nineteenth-century tone… Basically, it’s a lot of things that might make a person think it couldn’t possibly be as much fun as it is. And maybe it will change, but I'm already 400 pages along and I haven't stopped having a great time. If I didn’t enjoy it so much, why, I might sit down and read it straight through, finishing sometime in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, but I want it to last. I want it to keep inspiring me, because what’s even more fun is that the author is the youngest person to ever have won the Booker Prize. She’s also a woman. Hence, inspiring.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on a mission to read as many Booker Prize winners as I can this year. I’ve never disliked a Booker Prize book, not even the runners up. Yet. If Life of Pi isn’t enough to convince a person that these books are a list worth reading, then I dare you to read 2014 runner-up We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and tell me what you think. DO NOT READ ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK BEFORE READING IT. Don’t read the back cover, don’t read the reviews, don’t listen to anyone telling you anything about it, just trust me that it’s SO MUCH FUN and thank me later. (That’s exactly what my best friend did when I gave her the book for Christmas with a note blocking the summary on the back cover.)
There are plenty of heart-wrenching, prose-swimming novels amongst the winners of the Prize, and I love them equally. My favorite book of all time, The God of Small Things, falls into this category, as does last year’s winner (which I can’t stop raving about), The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I even loved Midnight’s Children, the 1981 winner that I found worn to shreds at a bookstore years ago.
I should stop and tell you right now that no author in the US-born author has ever won the Prize. This has more to do with the contest's rules than any lack of talent here, but last year, the rules changed: for the first time, US authors were allowed to compete. As we know, the Australian won, but it’s 2015 now and no doubt there will be some excellent US-authored books entered this time around. What a [nerdy] watershed moment it will be when my country takes the prize.
Back to The Luminaries, this book I’m currently devouring, carefully. The author takes 360 pages just to set up the turn of events that sets the book in motion, just to introduce the main characters (of whom there are many), and really, just to explain what happens at one, single meeting! And I still love it? Yes! She helps her readers along, repeating things that are important and even summing up what she spent 350 pages laying out – that way no one gets too lost. But the getting lost is seriously half the fun. What is going to happen? One person is dead, one almost died, one another vanished, and another appeared out of seemingly nowhere. Thirteen men are trying to figure out why the events seem so interrelated. There are astrological charts at the beginning of each section and I have no idea what they mean. I just can’t wait to figure it all out! (I am salivating right now.)
I may never be an Eleanor Catton, but I can surely allow her to be my muse for a while.
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