read a book a week

My pace has dropped somewhat because I’ve been reading travel guides of Japan for the past two weeks, but I did tackle a book from a Nobel laureate.

Booker winner in 1974. While excellently written, the plot is very slowly paced and the author is detached from her creations, which leads me to say that this is yet another Booker winner miss for me (the award seems to be very spotty in its infancy). Meh.

This Mistry book was nominated for the Booker prize, and is wonderfully visual in its descriptions of India. However, after a while I found that the unrelenting grimness of the storylines made it a hard book to finish or enjoy. I like pathos in a novel, but closing with 200 pages of it is a bit much.

In the mid-19th century Indian soldiers mutineered against British rule and turned on their colonial rulers. Atrocities were committed on both sides, but the British managed to reassert their power and governed India for almost a century more. After the mutiny siege novels became very popular amongst Victorian society, portraying the brave British defending their settlements against hoards of Sepoy soldiers. In 1973 this style of novel was revived by JG Farrell, and it won the prize that year. The updated version of the style managed to hint at greater issues that the British did not understand in their relationship with the Indian people, as well as the conflict between progress and tradition both in the British and Indian societies. It manages to do all this while maintaining the same tragicomic tone of Catch-22.

Something to Answer for is set in Egypt at the time of the Suez Crisis, and reminded me of a bad Phillip Marlowe novel. Not an awful book, but not really all that good either. It won the first Booker Prize in 1969.

In a Free State is set in a fictional African country teetering on genocide, while the privileged white compound workers are allowed to travel without fear. It won the booker prize in 1971.

Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2007, this 838 page book is a beast of a novel, with very little in the way of plot, but a huge depth of character study and experimentation with language. It turned out to be a real page turner due to the confusion and web of intrigue that the author creates. Awesome!

The book was far better than the film, and had an excellent twist at the end, which changed the whole perspective. It was also bundled with some mediocre short stories.