Booker Bookies

When is a literary prize like a horserace?

Of course, now that the Booker longlist has been announced, the bookmakers are out in force. According to The Guardian:

William Hill's choice as 3/1 favourite was McEwan, who won the award in 1998 with Amsterdam but was unlucky with his more recent bestseller Atonement. It made Barnes a 7/1 chance, below Coetzee and Ishiguro.

But Ladbroke's rated Barnes' story Arthur & George as 4/1 favourite, followed by McEwan at 5/1, Rushdie at 7/1 and the veteran writer Dan Jacobson at 8/1.

Ladbrokes has Tash at 20/1, the same odds as seven of the others on the long list including (to my great surprise!) Ishiguro.

I'm not really one for a flutter, although a horse I backed "both ways" for the Grand National once won and I bought my mum a pot plant with my vast winnings. I'm the woman who walked out of Genting casino having made a RM12 riggit profit on my initial investment of RM10 and haven't been back since. But this year I really think that I might put a little something on the literary gee-gees. (Have already made a wager in margueritas with my book club friends which may end up costing me dearly.)

I wouldn't normally get so excited about the Booker, but this year we have a vested interest, innit?

Of course, it must be a nailbiting time for the first-timers (" ... who add human drama to literary suspense on the list" as Nigel Reynolds wrote in the Telegraph.)

No bigger human drama perhaps than that of Harry Thompson, who was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer just weeks before his book was published in June, according to The Times.

I've enjoyed looking at the postings on the Guardian blog - especially readers' comments on other books that they feel should have been included on the longlist. There seems to be a certain amount of pissed-offness about the same old names (McEwan, Ishiguro, Coetzee, Rushdie) cropping up again and again (are the judges playing safe, or are these guys playing true to form?). The fresh voices on the list seem to be very much welcomed.

An interesting point raised is that a writer taken on by one of the larger publishing houses is actually disadvantaged, since only three books can be submitted by each publisher, regardless of the number of books they put out in a year. Someone else asked whether it is fair to have books on the list which haven't yet been published (i.e. the novels by Rushdie, Meek and Smith). Personally, I don't think so - there's always next year, isn't there?

I very much enjoyed reading Eric Forbes' comments on the contenders. Go take a look.

By the way, I sneaked over to MPH 1 Utama this morning to buy Ali Smith's The Accidental. I didn't think it would be too dangerous a mission because I had already noted its precise location on the shelves so that I could run in quickly, grab it without having any excuse to pick up other books, and pay with the book voucher accrued from all my overbookspending these past few months.

Sadly, I also spotted Margaret Atwood's latest collection of essays and reviews Curious Pursits. How could I just leave it there, especially as she writes so honestly about her own writing process?