To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)
Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
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.
