November/December 2024, Issue 3

THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING & READING GUIDE: Glam Literary Prize Lists and Great Reads

Happy Capitalism!

You may despise capitalist Christmas shopping, but you certainly can luxuriate in holiday reading. While the turkey is in the oven, peruse a gripping 87th Precinct mystery by Ed McBain, and after you’ve baked a pie or alternative no-fail chocolate chip cookies, you can dip into Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. There’s lots of down time on the holidays, though it is a well-kept secret.

I hope you enjoy the following Reading and Shopping guide, based on the 2024 Booker Prize lists and my recommendations.

Glam Booker Prize Finalists As Reading Guide

Some use the Booker Prize lists as a holiday guide.

I tell prize junkies: Caveat Emptor.

Because the lists can be a bit wonky. There were some stunning nominees for the 2024 Booker Prize, and some extremely disappointing choices (she says tactfully). As one American vlogger said of the shortlist: “What was that?”

On the other hand, Eric Karl Anderson, popular vlogger and book maven, considered it an unusually strong shortlist.

Predicting the Booker is a bit like playing the ponies. First, let’s study the longlist. My husband and I had tepid reactions. This is not uncommon: every July when the judges announce the longlist we believe we are about to find the Holy Grail. And then we discover the list is very, very long – need it be that long? – and we have scarcely made a dent in it when the shortlist is announced in September.

This year, we were determined to read the entire shortlist. Between us, we read five of the six books. Neither of us finished Anne Michaels’ Held, which begins during World War I and is composed in poetic vignettes. Still, it won the Giller Prize in Canada.

Captain Nemo predicted that Percival Everett’s novel, James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, would win the Booker. In fact, every blogger, vlogger, and Booker addict loved this novel. It is the only nominee that everybody agreed on. And since Everett was also shortlisted for the Booker in 2023, he was a strong candidate.

I noticed, however, that there were five women on the shortlist, so I figured it might be a toss-up between a woman and a Black man. Who knew?

I thought that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake had a chance of winning: her fast-paced literary spy novel is interwoven with beautiful email essays about the Neanderthals, who, according to the radical who lives in a cave and studies them, were more peaceful than Homo Sapiens – and the world would have been a better place if they’d survived.

There was no question that Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the first Dutch novel nominated for the Booker, did not belong on the shortlist. Her style is pedestrian, and if not for the twist in the last part of the novel, it would be a simple beach book. But people like beach books. A good read, not a great book.

Captain Nemo loathed Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, a meditative novel about a woman who retreats to a convent retreat house which is overrun with a plague of mice. It didn’t seem the right time for me to read this book, though I recommend Wood’s eerie, terrifying feminist dystopain novel, The Natural Way of Things.

And the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 is… Samantha Harvey’s Orbital! I admired this short lyrical novel set on a space station that revolves around our beautiful, benighted planet. Not much happens. The astronauts look at the earth. And the descriptions of Earth seen from space are gorgeous. Some of the astronauts want to stay in space forever. A woman’s mother dies. It is not the literary science fiction I’d expected: there is little plot. But I loved Harvey’s acceptance speech – she is a committed environmentalist – and you can watch/listen to her at the Booker ceremony video on YouTube.

My Personal Recommendations: Great Reads, New and Old

1. Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon (winner of the Waterstones debut fiction prize)
2. Blue in Chicago, by Bette Howland
3. The Famous Magician, by Cesar Aira
4. Lost on Me, by Veronica Raimo, translated from the Italian by Leah Janecsko
6. This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud (longlisted for the Booker 2024)
7. Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry (longlisted for the Booker 2024)

Happy, Happy Reading, Whatever the Time of Year, and Peace on Earth, Good Will to All!