Monday, January 12, 2009

The Booker Prize and Hair Shirts

I just finished The God of Small Things, which like A Fine Balance, is another well-written but horribly depressing novel about life in India.

The God of Small Things won the 1997 Man Booker Prize. The Booker Prize is given to the best original full-length novel written in English by a citizen of either the British Commonwealth or Ireland. I think The God of Small Things won because the British are still atoning for colonial occupation of India. Self-flagellation with a book like this is a step on the collective road to redemption.

I'm not even going to get into what it's about--it depresses me even to think about it. Suffice to say that I stayed up late Saturday night to finish The God of Small Things so I wouldn't have to read it for even one more day.

Now, does anyone have a good vampire novel recommendation?

2 comments:

AppyLove said...

500Jerk, I've been reading your blog (found you on mamapundit) and I dig it! My HTML tags aren't working, so imagine italics below, please.

I don't have any vampire recommendations outside the Twilight series (former eighth grade teacher, so you know I have read them all twice), but I did notice that you loved a book about western North Carolina. I read a book this fall called Jim the Boy that I highly recommend. The author is now teaching creative writing for Vandy's tiny (but fully funded) MFA program.

The book's epigram is a line from my all-time favorite novel, Charlotte's Web. So it had me, as they say, at hello.

Thanks for the blog! You're reminding me of a lot of reasons I'm excited to move back to Knoxville after my husband's residency.

500Jerk said...

Hi there! Thanks for the book recommendation and so glad you like the blog.

I have Cormac McCarthy's The Road up next in my reading queue (which also promises to be bleak), as well as Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (India again, uh-oh), so I will look up Jim the Boy.

Thanks for writing--hope to see you in Knoxville!