The Longlist For The Man Booker Prize 2014

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail)

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)

J,  Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) 

The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)

Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Dog, Joseph O'Neill (Fourth Estate)

Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)

How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

For your information this list above is the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2014.  I'm not going to run through each book and writer as I have done with the Nobel Prize (see http://whatihavegottenupto-thebookspy.blogspot.co.uk/) but I am going tell you my impressions of it.




Howard Jacobson is back on the list after I believe his last entry to be 'The Finkler Question'.  This time he seems to be trying to mark himself out as a kind of Kazuo Ishigaro or Haruki Murakami with, what could be called, human sci-fi.  He could also be trying to hark back to the dystopian worlds of Anthony Burgess.  It's good to see him challenging himself.




Siri Hustvedt is a novelist who is married to one of my favourite novelists, Paul Auster, but does this by proxy make her a good novelist?  From what I've read she does have similar overlaps but is a perfectly distinct storyteller in her own right, though I've yet to read any of her novels.  Probably the novelist I am looking forward to read the most from this list.




David Mitchell is back and back with a zinger of a title.  I've read his 'Ghostwritten' and enjoyed it very much.  He does well at making very technical plots easy to read.  I would like to read more of him.




Richard Powers is a very worthy novelist, full of heady ideas and his book on the list sounds like it's no different.  The novelist I think I Should read because I know it would be good for me.




I'm fond of Ali Smith due to a very vague connection with her through an old University friend and also I have enjoyed her stories.  I've only read her short story collection 'The First Person', which was a bit like a broken up novel, and enjoyed her perspective on storytelling.




The novelist I am going to officially back is Paul Kingsnorth with his book 'The Wake'.  This is mainly due to the fact that I bought it a long time ago, about two and a half years ago.  I only received his book earlier this year because it was made with the crowdsourcing publishers Unbound.  I had never bought anything crowdsourced before, only learnt the term fairly recently, so it was an experiment to see if the book would attract enough people to get the money it needed to make the book.  Crowdsourcing, if you don't know, is a way of getting money upfront from your audience so that you can then use that money to make the product.  It's a new business model that's best used on the Internet; there are websites such as SpaceHive and KickStarter that create hundreds of new products based on this.




Also, the book sounded like a great experience.  It's set in the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain it uses a version of the language of that time, which probably makes it hard to get into but would be, I imagine, a world that would place you and root you in that world.  I'm greatly looking forward to it.  And yes, mine does have Coptic stitching.  

The Peculiarity of the Vote

 Voting is a rare occurrence.  It happens least often than a birthday and it’s like going to see the nurse for an injection.  You think there should be something special behind the magic and mystery of political campaigning but in the end it’s just a piece of paper that needs crossing, then you wait.

I voted today but I’m not here to try to persuade you who to vote for, I simply want to record the adult feeling of participating in a democracy and the distinct blend of connection/ disconnection between the country as a whole and yourself as an individual. 

It’s a day where we all become powerful and are trusted enough to be put in the position to decide what is best for businesses and communities as a whole.  As a friend of mine said, it’s not in the broad strokes of people’s agreement that is interesting but the minutiae of the disagreeing details that are more fascinating.  The debates and discussions will go on and it is particularly fulfilling to be engaged with them as a human being but it is also important to note that politics cannot answer everything, there must be something else, in families, long walks and art.  Parties do not ultimately define us and we must be careful to pledge too much loyalty to them.

It is a peculiar thing, to vote.  Animals, as far as we know, do not do so yet the flourishing of our particular creation, civilization, demands that we must be able to.  Voting, if anything, reminds me of our strangeness as a species, an irresolvable facet of our being.    

My Diagnosis

At the beginning of this year I was, without pomp or ceremony, finally given a diagnosis to the mental health problems I have had throughout my adult life.  The diagnosis is that I have bi-polar disorder.  This makes me one of 250,000[1] people in Britain who have this illness. 

   

Am I glad to have a name to what I have had to go through?  Well, it doesn’t make too much difference to me.  I sort of knew I had it, or something similar, so the diagnosis was more of an ‘of course, that’s what it is’- but it does change the way I talk about it with other people.  Rather than say vaguely that I have mental health problems I can clearly say that I have bi-polar, and that offers up a more concentrated understanding of what it really is that I have to deal with.

   

The name identifies but the illness is still there.  I still have to deal with tiredness, part of the depressive side of the illness, and I still have to be vigilant and alert when I take part in intense activities, such as being in shows, but with all the work the mental health teams, both in England and in Wales, have done, and still doing, with me I have managed to overcome most of my problems.

   

I want to take the time to mention the Early Intervention Team and how they have helped me.  When I was eighteen and had my first episode of the illness there was no Early Intervention Team to help young people to stay healthy after their first encounter with psychosis.  When I ran away from University that year I stopped taking the drugs completely ending up dealing with severe depression for a year or two on my own.

   

When I had my episode while in my second year at Uni the Early Intervention Team had been newly created and though I was a bit older than who they would normally take because I would have been eligible for it when I had my first episode before they existed they thought it no problem for them to help this time around.  Since then they’ve been there when I needed them- sometimes weekly, sometimes once a month- I’ve found them to be a vital assert to the building and living my life with this illness.

   

It’s great to be living in a country of scientific advances that can supply Lithium to those like me who need it, the great thing being, as long as funding is rewarded to research, treatments for these illnesses will only get better.

   

What helps a lot for me is keeping active, seeing friends, writing scripts and doing shows.  It all stops me from allowing myself to relapse into depression but also trying to keep a regular routine helps me to keep grounded and stops me from flying off into a manic state.

   

I am hoping to do a show about mental illness because although awareness is getting better it’s like any serious illness: one can never be too aware, especially if you are undiagnosed and you think you may have an illness.

   

Nobody should feel as if they cannot talk about their own health and thankfully there are plenty of decent websites ready to give advice.  If you do think you are ill then the best thing to do is to see your GP who’ll be in a better position to offer you help; the second best thing to do is to educate yourself about mental illnesses, and this is advice to everyone reading not just those who may have an illness.

   

I’ve been fortunate but I’ve also worked hard at understanding how my body and my mind works.  One of the important things I’ve learnt is to seize the day when you can because you don’t know when you’ll have days when you can’t.

  

 So I have bi-polar but I look forward to the day when I don’t have to take any sort of medication for it.  It gives me something to work towards, which is itself hope. 

Below is a short list of videos that I've enjoyed and found interesting if not a little bit useful 

Now this is where you hit a paywall- well not exactly a paywall more like a moat you can swim across- but what I'm saying is that if you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me by going on Patreon.com and search for Alistair David Todd-Poet. 

I only ask for the lowest possible donation ($1) so that you don't have to wake up in the middle of the night sweating about bills and tax.  Two reasons I ask you of this is 1) It would mean a lot to me and 2) I can buy more books. 

Another way you can support me is by buying one of the literary books that I write.  The links are on the side of the website, if you are reading this from a mobile phone than switch to web mode to see it.

You can even message me with recommendations of books I should cover that I haven't already, I'd be really interested in what you have to offer me.  In the meantime stay safe and all the best to you.

 

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[1] http://www.pendulum.org/bpfacts.html