The Booker Review

This isn’t it; this is my bookshelf showcasing the first half of my Booker reading project:

I wasn’t kidding about The Little Prince being my favourite book, by the way; as you can see, I like to collect it in different languages from places I visit. You probably won’t guess, so I’ll tell you for free that the collection includes both Catalan and the Venetian dialect of Italian!

This is the shortlist: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2025-shortlist

I find quite often that my favourites don’t make it off the longlist, and I’m sad that neither of Misinterpretation or The South made the cut on this occasion. In fact only 2/7 of the ones I’ve read so far have been shortlisted, though, so I look forward to reading the rest of them!

One of the things I love about reader the Booker longlist is getting to take a world tour, with locals as my guide. So far this year I have been to the USA, Albania, Cumbria and Yorkshire (UK), Hungary and Malaysia – all from the comfort of my sunny reading chair! – and come back a little richer and wiser from each journey.

I find it interesting reading the different perspectives on the same material, especially having taken some pains not to read any opinions about each work before embarking on it, even to the extent of ignoring the blurbs and summaries on the dust jackets. So, for example, now reviewing the books in my stack at the halfway point, I find that the inside cover of Flesh – which I described as basically a lot of nothingness, a sea of one-word answers adrift through life’s inevitable dramas, everything understated – calls the protagonist a man who “spirals out of control,” carried on “the 21^st century’s tides of money and power.”

Really? That wasn’t exactly how I experienced the story.

I can’t quite agree, either, with Times reviewer Johanna Thomas-Corr’s proclamation that this shortlist “has rewarded maturity over novelty” (based primarily on the age of its authors). As probably my favourite of the bunch so far, I personally found Flesh to be very “novel,” and certainly unique. Although perhaps it still looks traditional in comparison to some recent Booker-longlisted stories which told entire stories in Twitter format (No One Is Talking About This, 2021) or in literal swirls and circles of words off the page (Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, 2022).

Just for your entertainment and interest, here is a list of things I have learnt by googling what I’ve read to far:

• There is no such thing as the ‘Cartmel Literature Festival’ (from Universality, Week 1), but it has its own website nonetheless (!). (And for a bonus point: I had also assumed this fictional event was modelled on the well-known Hay Festival, which I always thought was in Herefordshire, but I have now learnt is actually in Wales – just.)
•  The age of consent in Hungary is 14, which means technically István in Flesh (Week 4) is not underage. I don’t know how I feel about this.
• A “bodega” (as visited regularly in Misinterpretation, Week 6) is a New York word for what I think I would call a “corner shop”. It’s a Spanish word and might indicate a Hispanic neighbourhood.
• “Naftali,” the surname of the Jewish-American family in The Rest Of Our Lives (Week 7), is derived from a Hebrew word naphtali meaning “my struggle.”
• … And apparently my Week 2 review (The South) taught the word “anachronistic” to at least two people so far. (You know who you are, hello! 😊)

Are you reading along? What are your favourites so far? Leave me a comment!