Too Much Misery in Women's Lit?

There's not been much wit and not much joy, there's a lot of grimness out there ... Thereare a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing. ... I think the misery memoir has had its day, but there are an awful lot of books out there which had not a shred of redemption in them. I'm more of a light and shade person and there does need to be some joy, not just misery. ... I was surprised at how little I laughed … and the ones where there was humour were much appreciated I can tell you.

Judge Daisy Goodwin (the wonderful populariser of poetry) talks about what it was like to read 129 entries for The Orange Prize in three months, and says that she was sometimes driven to despair by the bleakness of the submissions. (Philip Henser in The Independent and William Skidelsky in The Observer both nod sagely in agreement, and this point really does beg wider discussion.)

But, says Godwin, she and her fellow judges are very proud of the longlist of 20 titles they have drawn up for the prize.  It features an both established authors (some names that spring out are Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Barbara Kingsolver, Sarah Waters, MJ Hyland and Sadie Jones) and seven first time novelists from around the world. (Click table to enlarge.)


The Orange Prize is 15 years old this year, and shows no sign of buckling under the annual exclamations of outrage that it is unfair to continue a prize which sidelines male fiction writers.

Postscript :

Elizabethhc on The Reading Copy blog blames Oprah for the trend of miserable reads.

Robinson Takes the Orange

Marilynne Robinson has won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for her third novel, Home.

Chair of Judges Fi Glover called it :

A kind, wise, enriching novel, exquisitely crafted. We were unanimously agreed – it is a profound work of art.

Her previous novels are Housekeeping (1981) and Gilead (2004) both of which were highly acclaimed and award-winning.

Here's the synopsis :

Jack – prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Gilead, Robinson’s last novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. ... His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father’s old friend, John Ames.

There's an excellent profile of Robinson by Emma Brockes today in The Guardian.

In her acceptance speech Robinson talked about how fiction could help people “step back” from material obsessions to re-assess “what is to be valued in life”.

No Preeta (Or Toni) on Orange Shortlist

The shortlist for the Orange Prize was announced yesterday at the London Book Fair. Sadly, Preeta's name is not there - but being longlisted for one of the most important literary prizes internationally is great recognition for a first novel.

The great surprise of the list is that Toni Morrison (who some of you saw as a dead cert) didn't make it either!

Three of the shortlisted authors are American though Ellen Feldman who is nominated for her third novel Scottsboro, Samantha Hunt for The Invention of Everything Else and Marilynne Robinson for her third novel, Home.

The others shortlisted are the British authors Samantha Harvey for The Wilderness, and Kamila Shamsie for Burnt Shadows; and Irish author Deirdre Madden (the only author to have been previously shortlisted for the prize twice) for Molly Fox's Birthday.

Said Fi Glover, Chair of Judges:

Choosing just six was far harder than I had imagined, but we all left the judging room proud of the list we have chosen.

More about the books and each of the authors on the prize website. The winner will be announced on 3rd June.

Orange for New Writers

There are just 3 names on this year's shortlist for the Orange Prize for New Writers :

Nami Mun - Miles From Nowhere

Ann Weisgarber - The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

Francesca Kay - An Equal Stillness

A bursary of £10,000 a year for three years is awarded for a first work of fiction to help the author's professional development.

Ann Weisgarber's novel also appears on the main longlist for the Orange Prize. (More here.)

Postscript :

Waitressing and being an Avon lady – and even criminal investigations – are all about understanding people's desires. I had to rely on my communication skills and empathy in these jobs... There was a shared emotion between them and me, the people I was sometimes talking to. We were all lonely.

In The Independent Korean American nominee Nami Mun talks about how her itinerant employment informs her writing.

Preeta for Orange!

A big cheer for our Preeta once again, because now she's on the longlist of another of the most prestigious international literary awards - the Orange Prize! (I notice this year the word Broadband seems to have been dropped from the name - just as well really.)

Here's the 20 strong list :

• Debra Adelaide - The Household Guide to Dying
• Gaynor Arnold - Girl in a Blue Dress
• Lissa Evans - Their Finest Hour and a Half
• Bernardine Evaristo - Blonde Roots
• Ellen Feldman - Scottsboro
• Laura Fish - Strange Music
• V.V. Ganeshananthan - Love Marriage
• Allegra Goodman - Intuition
• Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness
• Samantha Hunt - The Invention of Everything Else
• Michelle de Kretser - The Lost Dog
• Deirdre Madden - Molly Fox’s Birthday
• Toni Morrison - A Mercy
• Gina Ochsner - The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight
• Marilynne Robinson - Home
• Preeta Samarasan - Evening is the Whole Day
• Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows
• Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife
• Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans
• Ann Weisgarber - The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

You can find out more about each of these titles on the Orange Prize website.

Okay, the stats : American authors predominate (9/20) ; 6/20 are first novels (including, of course, Preeta's); four authors have been previously longlisted, and two of those reached the shortlist. Random House has more authors on the list than any other publisher (7/20).

Toni Morrison's is clearly the name spoken in most hushed tones ... but the British press is focusing on perhaps the most unlikely heroine of the list - Birmingham social worker Gail Arnor whose novel - a fictionalised account of the about the aftermath of Dicken's death - proves once again the dynamism of the tiny Tyndall Street Press. Some surprising names not on the list inc Helen Garner and Zoe Heller.

And the most common theme seems to be exile and migration.

Tomorrow, I bet, the bitching will start about how dare there be a woman-only literary prize, as it does every year. No-one has got around to starting up the Banana Bonanza for Blokes yet to shut these people up.

The shortlist will be announced on 21st April and the shortlist for the Orange Award for New Writers on 7th April. The winners of both awards will be announced at a ceremony on the 3rd June.

Fingers crossed for Preeta once again.

Tremain Takes Orange for Immigrant's Tale

In this country, prizes are like bumps in the road, sleeping policemen. You can't pretend they are not there, and anyone who says they don't care about them is being disingenuous.

Rose Tremain, one of Britain's most critically acclaimed authors has never won the Booker, but has scooped this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (for which she was nominated once before).

The Road Home tells the story of an Eastern European immigrant called Lev, who tries to make his way in Britain, and broadcaster Kirsty Lang, chair of the judges said of it :

We were all very impressed by the novel's main character and the empathy with which she has written him. We liked the cast of characters, and, though it could have been a worthy book, it wasn't.

You find out more about the book and Ms. Tremain on the Orange Broadband site and can read an extract here.

The 2008 Orange award for new writers was won by Joanna Kavenna for Inglorious, which Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian describes as

... a tale of a disaffected journalist's descent into nervous breakdown

I have to admire this lady's perspicacity and determination - she said she had 13 "unpublishable" novels rejected before this!

Meanwhile of course, the ding-dong about whether it's' fair to have a separate prize for women continues with Tim Lott in The Telegraph pointing out that we don't have literary prizes for other disadvantaged groups like the handicapped and people of colour. (Has he never heard of the Decibel Prize?) It's tiresome to see critics inflating like puffer fish as the very mention of the Orange, though sure, it's hard to justify positive discrimination in a year when women have swept all the major literary prizes in the UK.

I did though like this comment left on Lott's post by someone calling themself Chas Pooter :

Novel writing is the one literary
form in which women have always
excelled, indeed led. The novel as
we know it was invented by Mrs
Behn, and she was buried in
Westminster Abbey (though not, it
is true, for being a pioneer
lady-of-letters). In every generation,
from Austen to the Dribbles,) the
leading novelists have been ladies.
And male novelists, from
Richardson's PAMELA onwards,
have been pre-occupied with the lot
of woman. Perhaps the founders of
the Orange Prize have not read any
of them.

The Orange and Sour Lemons

The Orange Broadband Prize longlist has been announced and includes both veterans and new comers, but misses off a couple of names most Orange watchers thought would be there viz A.L. Kennedy and Nichole Barker, Lindesay Irvine reports in the Guardian.

And the nominees are :

Anita Amirrezvani - The Blood of Flowers
Stella Duffy - The Room of Lost Things
Jennifer Egan - The Keep
Anne Enright - The Gathering
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom
Nancy Huston - Fault Lines
Gail Jones - Sorry
Sadie Jones - The Outcast
Lauren Liebenberg - The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Charlotte Mendelson - When We Were Bad
Deborah Moggach - In The Dark
Anita Nair - Mistress
Heather O'Neill - Lullabies for Little Criminals
Elif Shafak - The Bastard of Istanbul
Dalia Sofer - The Septembers of Shiraz
Scarlett Thomas - The End of Mr Y
Carol Topolski - Monster Love
Rose Tremain - The Road Home
Patricia Wood - Lottery

Should curiosity propel you to find out more about each of the books and their authors, the Orange Prize website has plenty of information.

The usual do-we-actually-need-a-separate-prize for women's fiction arguments are rehashed. Should anyone (still?) need convincing Maureen Freely makes a pretty good case.

Lindesay Irvine on the Guardian blog makes me smile with his summary of literary prize controversies :

Tradition decrees that no major literary prize is complete without a decent ding-dong. This may be the fault of journalists - those people over there, you understand - since "Twenty Interesting Novels in Running for Book Prize" is not the most compelling headline. ... These rows almost invariably slot into one of three categories - Omission scandal! Inexpert Judge Outrage! Selection Criteria Injustice!

before giving a run-down on some of the heated discussion which has dogged the Orange.

All I can say to that is - may the best woman win! The shortlist is announced 15 April, and the winner 4 June. The New Writers shortlist is announced 8 April.

Postscript :

Here's a real squirt of lemon-juice. Tim Lott in the Telegraph calls the Orange a sexist con-trick, and reckons it's not needed because :

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important publishing prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

When are men going to stop whining and finally unpeel the Banana Prize for Blokes' Books?

Beware of Ghosts in the Shopping Mall!

It strikes me that several British novels (all by women) seem to be exploring the same territory: Nicola Barker's Darkmans, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black and now Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost are set in post-industrial landscape which is ugly, dehumanised and despairing, and the ghosts of the past are clawing their way through the fabric of time to meddle with the present.

Catherine O' Flynn sets her novel in a Birmingham shopping mall, Green Oaks (actually the main character in the book) while the ghost in question is that of a ten year-old girl, Kate Meany, who went missing (presumed murdered) back in 1980. She appears one night on the CCTV camera of security guard Kurt, while Lisa (deputy manager of Your Music shop) finds a toy stuffed behind the pipes in a service corridor. The novel unfolds as a kind of whodunnit mystery.

The first section of the book takes place in the year Kate, aged 10, disappeared. The story of little Kate playing at detectives with her stuffed monkey Mickey in tow is charming and Kate and her rebellious friend Theresa are the most fully realised and likable characters in the book. If this first section reads like the start of a children's novel, the story soon moves on to more sinister stuff.

I've always felt that shopping malls despite their surface glitz and glamour have a dark underbelly.

Detour - I can't stay long in the big ones without feeling that I'm going to have a panic attack from all the sensory overload (honestly!). I remember being utterly freaked out 1 Utama car park at night hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the loudspeakers echoing through soulless concrete caverns. It was just like the use of hearing Beethoven's 9th in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange - dismayingly incongruous!

In O'Flynn's novel, Green Oaks (apparently modelled on the Westfield mall) acts as a giant magnet, drawing in the dispossessed and dissatisfied who mooch around the shops all day with nothing better to do and nowhere better to go. O'Flynn is a careful observer, maybe because she herself has worked in retail and been a mystery-shopper and thus experienced of much she writes about, and she is at her best recording the disembodied voices which themselves float, ghost-like, through the mall.

Another detour - I used to work in one of the Birmingham-based shops she mentions in the first section - Midland Educational in their toyshop branch, Barnaby's and there was much in the book that took me back to that time. The utter dead-endness of the job, the petty rivalries between the staff, the sheer exhaustion of having to remain on your feet and be polite to people for hours at a time.

I felt such pain for the poor old man in O'Flynn's book, strung along sadistically for 23 months waiting for his order of a classical cassette that never comes ... because I can remember serving on the most hated counter in the toyshop - the one customers came to for their repairs of Hornby model trains and Scalextric cars. Week after week I'd have to see the same faces, and have to answer the same questions about when their repairs were coming back. And of course politely fob the customers off until the next week. (Oh, I tell you, this book brought back memories!)

Malaysians with their love of shopping malls will definitely be able to relate to the book. It's also an enjoyable, fairly breezy read, although there is such an undercurrent of sadness for what was lost.

And what was lost, in the end? A girl's life, sure, but there are other poignant losses along the way - hope, ambition, self-esteem, a sense of direction.

But perhaps other things are gained. Theresa has Kate to thank for her success in life, and the mystery brings together Kurt and Lisa and shakes them out of their ruts. Above all, the novel ends with a sense of painful things finally being resolved.

The novel is very cleverly and neatly plotted, even if it can be argued (as some readers have) that there is a little too much coincidence at the end. Maybe, in that sense, that makes it a good antidote to Darkmans and Anne Enrights The Gathering where we are left with only loose ends in our hands when we try to conclusively solve the central mystery.

I'm happy for O'Flynn that Tyndall Street Press took a risk on her and look forward to seeing what she does next. The novel, you will recall, was longlisted for the Booker, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and has just won the Costa First Novel Award. Not bad at all!

Here's an interview with O'Flynn bout the book from Brightcove. How nice to hear a Brummy accent again. (I used to have one ...).

Orange-Flavoured Fiction

The 2007 Orange Broadband Prize goes to .... (drumroll, please, while I open the envelope) Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (left, at the Guardian Hay festival).

And the Orange Broadband Award for First Writers goes to ... (another drumroll) Karen Connelly for The Lizard Cage.

Am longing to read both ... the first I have, and it's shouting at me from my TBR shelf. The other I haven't seen in the bookshops here yet.

Do check out the author websites. Chimamanda has set up a site especially for the book which includes a board for readers to post their memories of the Biafran war. Karen Connelly's includes her journal.

Another Shortlist or Two

The shortlist for other the Orange Broadband Prize, that for new writers has been announced, and it is a very short shortlist with just three titles on it this time:

Clare Allan- Poppy Shakespeare
Karen Connelly- The Lizard Cage
Roopa Farooki - Bitter Sweets

You can find out more about the titles and read an extract here.

I am cheering though at seeing Canadian author Karen Connelly's name on the list! In a sense she isn't a new "writer" as she has had poetry and non-fiction published previously, although The Lizard Cage is her first novel.

I first came across her work when I happened upon (in Guardian Pharmacy, in the days when it was the only place that sold books in Bangsar Baru!) Touch the Dragon, a collection of pieces which began life as journal entries and letters written when she spent a year living in Thailand when she was 17. I was blown away by the beauty of the images she captured and her power of observation, and when I lent the book to a "friend" who didn't return it, I had to hunt for another copy at abebooks! If you want an excellent example of a writer's journal, do try to get hold of a copy.

The 2007 shortlist for Australia's premier prize for fiction, The Miles Franklin Literary Award has also been announced and is also nicely short.

Deborah Robertson- Careless
Alexis Wright- Carpentaria
Gail Jones - Dreams Of Speaking
Peter Carey - Theft : A Love Story

Am rooting for Carey of course, though that hardly seems fair when I haven't read the others on the list yet! Anyway, links to further information about all theses titles can be found in the official website.

Postscript

The other titles nominated for the miles franklin award do sound very interesting - do take a look at these articles in the Age and the Australian.

Books for the Boys

Since Glenda seemed quite intrigued by the comment I made yesterday about male readers choosing not to read female authors I thought I'd post up the article I wrote on the subject. This piece appeared in (the now sadly defunct) men's magazine Chrome in January 2006. Don't know how many of you read it at the time. Greenbottle and Amir Hafizi will find their own words still reverberating!

One rainy afternoon in Bangsar some years go, I was browsing in the shelves of my favourite second-hand bookshop when an elderly, dhoti-clad gentleman burst in from the street, brandishing a copy of Middlemarch at Skoob’s proprietor, Thor Kah Hong. Thor had apparently recommended the novel as the kind of improving read this gentleman said he was after. But now his customer was absolutely irate and demanding the book be changed.

“Why does she call herself George? I don’t read books by women writers.” He spat out the last two words as if they left a rancid taste in the mouth.

The answer is quite simple, of course. Mary Anne Evans became George Eliot to protect herself from prejudice in a predominantly patriarchal society, just as many other women authors have changed their names over the years to make sure that their work was judged solely on its merit.

The most famous woman writer in 19th century France, Aurore Dupin, published under the pseudonym George Sand. The Bronte Sisters, Charlotte, Anne and Emily published under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame) chose to write under the male name Isak Dinesen. Lula Mae Smith wrote as Carson McCullers, and Janet Taylor Caldwell dropped her first name so as to be taken more seriously, writing also as Max Reiner.

Even in recent times, women writers have chosen to reduce their given names to initials so as to become sexually ambiguous; Booker winner A. S. Byatt and Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy among them. J.K. Rowling says she decided to write under her initials rather than her full name because she didn’t want the fact that she was a female to deter boys from reading her books.

But in these more enlightened times surely our Middlemarch wielding gentleman is an anachronistic exception, and writers like Rowling overly cautious? Sadly, it seems not.

Earlier this year, academics Annie Watkins and Lisa Jardine of Queen Mary College, London, carried out a piece of research to mark the tenth anniversary of the Orange Prize for fiction. They surveyed 100 academics, critics and writers – the people they felt were most likely to be well-read and have the most influential opinions about literature to find out their attitudes to the gender of authors.

They found that while women read writers of both sexes quite happily, most men did not. Four out of five men had most recently finished a book by a male, and most had trouble remembering the last novel by a female writer they had read.

Wanting to see if this held true in the Malaysian context, I carried out a small scale survey on my blog and found much the same results. Asked to say what they were currently reading, over 80% of the men said that they were engrossed in a book by a male author. However, unlike the sample interviewed in Britain, most said that they did read women writers and were able to recall the last book they’d read by one.

For most men, Watkins and Jardine concluded, great writing is male writing and they find it more difficult to like or admire a novel authored by a woman. This held true for one or two of my blog readers. “I don’t think women can write like Marquez, Nabokov or Gunther Grass,” wrote one blogger known as Greenbottle, “to me these guys write as though with penis instead of pen, full of masculine animal energy.” He felt that many women writers, on the other hand, tended to produce “saccharine, wimpy or effeminate writing”. Another blogger, Amir, felt that “prose written by a lot of female authors tends to be, how do you say it? Delicate? Detailed? Ditzy?”.

More worrying is that these prejudices also appear to extend to those who make recommendations about the best books to read and influence buying habits. Of 56 books suggested by male celebrities in the Observer’s summer reading list in 2003, only 6 were by women. A tally of Time magazine’s 100 All-time Novels chosen by critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo and published earlier this year listed only 10 novels by women writers. (Closer to home, see how many articles about women writers you can find in the archives of the Silverfish litmag!) You can’t help but wonder whether women writers are playing on an even playing field.

Now, I’m certainly not one to press for political correctness at the expense of literary merit, and I fully recognise that male readers of fiction are in any case an endangered species (author Ian McEwan went as far as to say that when women stop reading, the novel will be dead).

But if your reading diet has hitherto consisted almost entirely of male writers, perhaps it’s time, at last, to give women a chance?

Orange Flavoured Fiction

The shortlist for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was announced yesterday, and these are the finalists:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun

Rachel Cusk - Arlington Park

Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss

Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Jane Harris - The Observations

Anne Tyler - Digging to America

You can read more about these titles here. And if it so be your desire, you can watch a video of the judges discussing their experiences.

Muriel Gray, chair of judges, described the shortlist as incredibly exciting:

It represents six beautifully crafted pieces of work that are as accessible as they are fascinating. That this outstanding writing should come from such diverse sources that includes five different nationalities, a world famous author, as well as a first-time novelist, is doubly thrilling.

Postscript

Some interesting debate on the Guardian blog about who deserves to win (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie seems to be emerging as the favourite) ... and whether there should be a prize for women's fiction alone when there is no equivalent Banana Prize for men!

Orange Goes Broadband

I don't get it, I really don't get it. You have a perfectly good, well-respected name for a literary prize and then you change it to something totally naff!

I didn't much like the Whitbread's rebirth as the Costa Prize (named after the UK coffee chain) but I can live with it.

But I have a much stronger dislike for the new name for the Orange Prize: The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

The new title reflects the evolution of Orange's business following the introduction of the Orange home broadband service in 2006.

says the blurb on the website. To me it not only sounds clumsy ... it just seems so blantantly commercial. Why mess with something that was already fine?!

Still, them who pays their money takes their choice, innit? And it is after all a very necessary prize, highlighting the best women's fiction in English from around the world when female authors play on an uneven field.

And here's the longlist:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson
Over by Margaret Forster
The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger
When to Walk by Rebecca Gowers
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
The Observations by Jane Harris
Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland
The Girls by Lori Lansens
Alligator by Lisa Moor
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Careless by Deborah Robertson
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert
Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley
Booktest by Test Tester
Digging to America by Anne Tyler
The Housekeeper by Melanie Wallace

You can find out much more about all of these titles on the Orange Broadband website.

Some of the titles have already been nominated for (or have even won) other awards. As Sarah Crowne points out in the Guardian:

"Diversity" is the word on the lips of the 2007 Orange Broadband prize judges this morning, following the announcement of a longlist that features 20 novels from seven different countries, and pits eight first-time novelists against six longlist veterans, a Booker winner and one author - Margaret Forster - who has 23 novels to her name.

But, she goes on to ask on the Guardian blog, do we really need to know the whole longlist?

I'm in two minds about it. I like to have lots of recommendations for good reads, but then I get frozen up by the sheer impossiblity of ploughing through everything on the lists when I already have a to-be-read pile the size of Mount Everest. Still I will greet all these books like old friends when I hit the bookshops and warehouse sales and no doubt rapacious bookgreed will over take me, to be followed immediately by an even more debiltating case of bookguilt.

And as a blogger reporting the longlist/shortlist/winner for prize after prize gets a bit taxing ... and I don't know how interested you lot actually are!

Another Shot

If you don't win one literary prize, hopefully you get a shot at another! I'm happy for Ian McEwan whose Saturday has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize after losing out so badly in the Booker stakes.

And while Sarah Walters lost out to Zadie Smith in the Orange stakes, I'm sure we'll be seeing The Night Watch on the list for other awards later in the year. (It will eligible because it was only published this year, unlike the other Orange shortlisted books.) It is that good, believe me. John Ezard in the Guardian reckons it has a "formidable chance" of taking the Booker or the Whitbread.

I'd have hated to be a judge for either the Orange or the Booker with so many strong titles to choose from. And I am still perplexed by Robert McCrum's article on the novel losing its way. I am one happy reader and will let you know if that changes.

Related Posts

His Saturday - My Sunday (4/9/05)
The James Tait Black Shortlist Announced (3/5/06)

Zadie for Orange

This year's Orange prize has been won by Zadie Smith for her novel On Beauty which also made the 2005 Booker shortlist.

I've now read 3 of the shortlisted novels (most recently Sarah Walters The Night Watch, which is still sitting in my head and I will tell you about anon), but Zadie is still on my to-be-read shelf, an enjoyable experience anticipated. (After a couple of have-to-reads.)

Picture (nicked from the Guardian) shows Zadie standing in front of a portrait of E.M. Forster: her novel is a contemporary reworking of Howard's End.

Orange Flavoured

I'd be terribly derelict in my litblogging duties if I didn't let you in on the Orange Prize Shortlist (I'm a bit late as it is, she admits shamefacedly.)

And the nominations are:

• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
  Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
  The Accidental by Ali Smith
  On Beauty by Zadie Smith
  Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
  The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

You can read more about the titles at the Orange Prize website.

Let's see. I've read two of the titles. Own four of them.

And the Carrie Tiffany novel had slipped beneath my radar. She may well win if the current spell of good luck for writers with an Aussie connection still holds.

Anyway, place your bets! The award ceremony will be held June 6th.

All Angst and Orwell?

Gender differences in reading habits is a topic that keeps coming back to haunt this blog. Small wonder because these differences in reding habit give a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the opposite sex.

Researchers Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of the University of London interviewed 500 men, all with some professional connection to literature, and asked them about the novel that most changed their life. This piece of research was actually a follow-up to a similar survey carried out last year, asking women for their seminal novel. Both studies were conducted in conjunction with the Orange Prize.

They found that:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion ...

And here's the list of favourites that emerged:

• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Professor Jardine commented that:

... men do not regard books as a constant companion to their life's journey, as consolers or guides, as women do. They read novels a bit like they read photography manuals. The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading.

Men did not come up with anywhere like the range of titles that the women did, and did not regard novels as life companions in the same way that women did.

And shock horror: the study also revealed that men between the ages of 20 and 50 generally do not read fiction. (Actually, I think we more or less knew this already.)

Does the survey actually teach us anything useful? There's lively discussion of the issues raised on the Guardian blog.

Anyway, let's chuck the discussion over to the male readers of this blog - what is the most important novel you've ever read? Is it on the list or something different?

Y'know I've really got to scratch my head to think about the answer to this for myself ... there are so many ...

But 1984 would be pretty high up on my list too ...

Books in Custody

The competition of find Britain's best reading group was recently won by a inmates of a prison. The Penguin/Orange Prize was awarded to the "book loving fools" of High Down Prison reading group, Surrey.

Loved the reaction from the one-male member of our group Fiction&Friends when I forwarded an article about the finalists:

"Am laughing out loud at the fact that the only all-male book club consists of a bunch of convicts. So that's how you get men to read. Take them out of the general population and lock them up!"

Why is it that women love to meet and talk books but men not?

Postscript:

Read about Nick Hornby's prison visit.