Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

I finished another excellent book this morning. Matilda lives on an island which is under threat from Redskin soldiers and Rebels. She goes to a school run by the one white man on the island, Mr Watts, and which has one book - Great Expectations. Matilda and the other pupils get to know Pip very well, as Mr Watts rereads them the story over and over, interspersed with practical advice from their mothers and grandmothers. I did not see the twist in the story coming at all, so was quite taken aback. Highly recommended!

Best of the Booker

I was interested to read that the Man Booker Prize is going to award a Best of the Booker Award for the best Booker winner from the past forty years. It got me wondering how many of these books I have actually read ...

The list below was found at Times Online:

1969 P H Newby, Something to Answer For (Faber & Faber)
1970 Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member (Eyre & Spottiswoode)
1971 V S Naipaul, In a Free State (Deutsch)
1972 John Berger, G (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
1973 J G Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
1974 Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (Cape) and Stanley Middleton, Holiday (Hutchinson)
1975 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (John Murray)
1976 David Storey, Saville (Cape)
1977 Paul Scott, Staying On (Heinemann)
1978 Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (Chatto & Windus)
1979 Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (Collins)
1980 William Golding, Rites of Passage (Faber & Faber)
1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Cape)
1982 Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark (Hodder & Stoughton)
1983 J M Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (Secker & Warburg)
1984 Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (Cape)
1985 Keri Hulme, The Bone People (Hodder & Stoughton)
1986 Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils (Hutchinson)
1987 Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (Deutsch)
1988 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (Faber & Faber)
1989 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Faber & Faber)
1990 A S Byatt, Possession (Chatto & Windus)
1991 Ben Okri, The Famished Road (Cape)
1992 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (Bloomsbury) and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (Hamish Hamilton)
1993 Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Secker & Warburg)
1994 James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late (Secker & Warburg)
1995 Pat Barker, The Ghost Road (Viking)
1996 Graham Swift, Last Orders (Picador)
1997 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Flamingo)
1998 Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (Cape)
1999 J M Coetzee, Disgrace (Secker & Warburg)
2000 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (Bloomsbury)
2001 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (Faber & Faber)
2002 Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (Canongate)
2003 DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little (Faber & Faber)
2004 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Picador)
2005 John Banville, The Sea (Picador)
2006 Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Penguin)
2007 Anne Enright, The Gathering (Cape)

Okay, so not many ... four of them! Hmmm. Ten percent ... maybe not that bad! And out of those four? Well, not Disgrace, which was okay, but not that great. I enjoyed Rites of Passage very much - I studied it at uni, and found the twists fascinating - The God of Small Things, which I read some years ago, was excellent, and I have recently enjoyed The Gathering. So I think it could be a hard task!

Not Without My Sister by Kristina, Celeste and Juliana

This multiautobiography tells the intertwined tale of three sisters (one father, two mothers) who were brought up in the Children of God, now known as The Family International. An interesting insight into their lives, exposing the abuse they had to face in different ways as they were moved around the world as countries began to chase the Family out. As an RE teacher, it is interesting to see examples of many of the indicators of a cult being described - the charismatic leader, the almost Scriptural additional writings, the exclusion from the world, the bizarre and sometimes illegal practices. The one slight criticism is that the title is obviously meant to conjure up "Not Without My Daughter", but the girls were often separated, and in many ways had to leave the Family individually, so even though there are similarities, it does feel as if they are drawing on the fame of the first book! But it's a good read anyway.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

I finished this earlier in the week. I also enjoyed this, although I think I would agree with giving the Booker Prize to The Gathering instead - I think it has the slight edge. However, I did enjoy reading this novella; the first three chapters at least. The build up to the consummation of the marriage, the intrepidation, nervousness and fear, I thought was very well presented, interspersed with memories of the courting leading to the marriage. However, I was a bit disappointed with the anticlimax, which seemed a bit of a cop out. I would have been interested to see how McEwan handled the fall out if things had turned out slightly differently.