Went to my local Waterstone's at the weekend to check out the books on the 2005 Booker shortlist. I'm really looking forward to reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. Ali Smith's The Accidental is a possibility, as is Julian Barnes' Arthur and George but I must confess that John Banville's The Sea and Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way didn't catch my interest at all. Which is not a judgement on their literary merit, just my personal feeling.
These days I feel less and less obliged to read "worthy" books that do not capture my interest. But then I find that my tastes also change and a book that I felt I couldn't read last year may become one of my favourites the year after. I think it's a complex mixture of where I am geographically and mentally at a particular moment....
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Havent read the Booker winner yet, will get round to it.
Shalimar the Clown is next on my list after Marquez's "Memories of my Melancholy Whores" but I have read Zadies's latest and I love it even though the prose in places becomes sooooo disappointingly mundane. But on the whole, I think it is an accompli(shing) book.
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