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!