Success Alert: A Shortlist Story

I love book prizes, but never pick the winner.

This year I have read four of the six novels on the Women’s Prize shortlist. I wasn’t prescient: I picked them at random.  Some bloggers and vloggers read the entire 16-book longlist and then predict the shortlist and the winner. I’m strictly a Win, Show, or Place type myself.

I read the following four shortlisted books: Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, Miranda July’s All Fours, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, and Nussaibah Younis’s Fundamentally. 

And Now, for the Fun Part of This Post:  What I Might Read This Weekend!

1. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf:  A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney.  I love Jane Austen.  What could be more exciting than reading about Jane Austen’s reading? Ann Radcliffe’s Gothics bore me, but I want to read Elizabeth Inchbald. Romney also explores why some of Austen’s favorite books have disappeared from our shelves.
2. A Pocketful of Wry, by Phyllis McGinley.  McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. She wrote witty, clever poems about women’s lives, the pre-election vote, a letter to the American Medical Association, and “communing” with Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and L. MacNiece. Apparently poets were miffed when she won the prize because her poetry RHYMES. She has a light touch and a sense of humor. Read her poems in the bathtub, on the bus, or in your coziest chair.
3.  City, by Clifford D. Simak.  In this charming science fiction novel, the last beings on earth are talking dogs and robots.  The dogs are puzzled by eight extant human tales in their archives. Were they really written by human beings? Did humans ever exist?.  Some scholarly dogs believe the tales are ancient doggish literature. In the faux preface, the dog narrator summarizes the criticism.  “Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with almost pure myth and that as a result no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with symbolism to which the key has long been lost.” There’s more.
4. The Second Rumple Omnibus, by John Mortimer.  I left The First Rumpole Omnibus on a plane, so am glad I had the Second Rumpole Omnibus at home.  In this witty collection of short stories, the rumpled, eccentric Rumpole, a barrister who represents the poor and the assumed-guilty at the Old Bailey, investigates his clients’ cases between conversations with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (his wife).
5. Homing, by Jon Day.  I bought this at Waterstones and promptly forgot about it.  Jon Day, a lecturer in English at King’s College London, has been fascinated by pigeons since childhood when he named one of his “rescue”” pigeon Psycho.  And after he moved to the suburbs as an adult, he built a coop and began to race pigeons.  In my neighborhood there are only chickens and bees.  Should I keep pigeons? There might be complaints.

All these books look so-o-o-o good.  And I’m glad to be done with contemporary fiction for the moment.