How many Booker prize winners have you read?

[LBirch02]

2 for me

Actually 3

About 4½, I think.

The ½ being Wolf Hall, which I made three valiant attempts at, with varying but all incomplete degrees of success.

Ha I’ve yet to tackle Wolf Hall!!

I've just checked the full list - 13, though not the winning book in all cases.

The fact that I've made it through Midnight's Children, various bits of James Joyce, most of Austen/Dickens/the Brontës/Shakespeare, the Bible from cover to cover, all of Harry Potter, and various works in Old and Middle English (some of these via an English degree, some through choice, some through bloody-mindedness) but couldn't get through Wolf Hall should tell you something about Wolf Hall, or about me, one or the other.

I mean, "more of a slog than Pamela and War and Peace put together" is not the most sparkling endorsement.

But I know people who couldn't put Wolf Hall down. I wonder what it is about that book.

16.... but not The Narrow Road to the Deep North which I really want to read...

Sauvignon - you absolutely must!!!

I salute anyone who gets through James Joyce you succeeded where I didn’t!

I started it...and it started so well.... but I don't want to pick it up and read 15 minute bursts, it needs a proper session and they're so few and far between! I loved two of his other books.

Loads, but I have had a bit of a bucket list thing going on with the Booker prize for years.

@LBirch02

I salute anyone who gets through James Joyce you succeeded where I didn’t!

It helps to know you're going to have to discuss it for an hour with a subject specialist face to face, with Wolf Hall I didn't have that external motivator 😂

I've read 18 winners, and quite a lot of the short-listed books.

Lots

Lit fic has a particular set of conventions, which is why certain authors show up again and again… I think if you don't get on with the things Booker judges value, there's no virtue in forcing yourself to slog through them. If you do get on with them, though, the Booker list can be very handy!

I can’t even look at the Wiki of shortlists and winners because the judges made so many monumentally dimwit decisions so often. I’m assuming it’s often pure horse trading and none of the judges get the winner they really want, but anyone who genuinely thinks AS Byatt’s Possession (a novel I like) is better than John McGahern’s Amongst Women or William Golding’s Rites of Passage is better than Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid should have their reading glasses confiscated.

7

I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do!

Any recommendations from the list?

Recommendations:
Stanley Middleton - Holiday
Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

18 winners, 11 of the female winners. Clearly I like the female booker winners because I have a couple more in my TBR bookcase.

I’m very surprised to realise I’ve read 11 winners. I loved The God of Small Things, The Bone People and The White Tiger. I wasn’t a fan of Vernon God little or The Line of Beauty.

9 of the winners plus 20 of the shortlisted. So far too few, really.

It might be quite a fun reading challenge - to tick off the whole lot!

Just read through the list of winners and I've read 4 including Life of Pi which was so bloody awful, I just can't imagine what the Judges were thinking!