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On the Holloway Road – free sample

Andrew Blackman — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:22:28 +0000

My publisher, Legend Press, is offering a free sample of the first two chapters of On the Holloway Road as a special Christmas giveaway. Click here to access it – not sure how long it’ll be available.

Merry Christmas to all my readers, and thanks for all the wonderful comments over the year – it’s been great getting to know you! I haven’t been online much for the last couple of months as I’ve been busy with other things, but will return in 2012 with a new look for the blog and a few exciting pieces of news…

“Tail of the Blue Bird” by Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Andrew Blackman — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:57:00 +0000

This is a VERY belated post for Ghanaian Literature Week, organised by the wonderful Kinna. I signed up for it back in October, but since then a few things have sucked up a lot of my time and energy.

Anyway I did read a Ghanaian book during the week itself, and it was an excellent one – Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It’s interesting in that it follows the general trajectory of a genre crime novel, but departs into fresh and interesting territory. It starts with the discovery of a body, then proceeds through the recruitment of a forensics expert to lead the investigation, the introduction of a slightly mismatched sidekick, the details of the investigation, and finally the production of a verdict.

Sounds like a standard police procedural, doesn’t it? Thankfully it’s far more interesting than that.

There’s the language, for a start, which is elegant and well-crafted from the first page to the last, and laced with untranslated Twi words which, for me as a British reader, enhanced the sense of an unfamiliar context but did not impede my understanding at all. There are quite different voices and narrative styles, all handled very effectively.

Then there’s the fascinating interplay between traditional and modern Ghanaian culture, represented by the old hunter Yaw Poku in the isolated village of Sonokrom and the foreign-educated forensics expert Kayo parachuted in from the city. It’s interesting that with the other police characters, it’s a clash of cultures – the police trample over the village, interrogate people, show no respect, and get nothing as a result. But Kayo treats the villagers and their customs with respect, asks for permission from their chief before beginning his investigation, solicits Yaw Poku’s help and opinions, and is willing to listen to the explanations and sample the potions of the local medicine man. Kayo believes in science, but is surprisingly open to non-scientific explanations as well, and for me this made it a far more interesting novel than if it had been a simple ‘clash’ of modern against traditional. This felt more like a fusion, with both sides taking on elements of the other (Yaw Poku, for example, is impressed by Kayo’s forensic techniques and eager to find out more about them).

Another radical departure from the traditional crime-novel template is in the resolution. I won’t give it away, but will say that it’s far less neat and clear-cut than the endings of most crime novels. Yaw Poku tells a story which bears a striking resemblance to the case being investigated – it could be his explanation of what really happened, or it could be just a story. Kayo puts together a report for his superior, giving him the “CSI-style” report he asked for, but despite the scientific language and the detailed description of facts and evidence, it could be a story like Yaw Poku’s. Once again, traditional and modern are merging and blurring, and the boundaries between the two are far from clear. Maybe there’s more truth and logic in traditional culture than we often recognise – and more fiction and imagination in science than we like to admit.

My only criticism was that the part with Kayo in the city encountering various obstacles to taking the case felt a little long. It’s obvious he’ll end up taking the case in the end, so I wasn’t sure of the point of dragging it out. But it’s a minor point. The novel is pretty slim as a whole, so the delay was not major. Overall I’m very glad I discovered this book, and would recommend it as something quite different, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Kinna held a Twitter chat with the author, which again I missed, but there’s a summary here if you’d like to find out more about the book and the writer.

German Literature Month readalong, Effi Briest – part 3

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:16:52 +0000

So it’s week 3 of German Literature Month, organised by Lizzie and Caroline. We’re reading Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane.

Why do you think Effi kept Crampas’s letters?

I found it a little implausible at the time, because it was such a huge risk for her to take, and she must have known what the consequences would be if Innstetten found them. But I can see that the affair meant a lot to Effi, even though I don’t think she had very deep feelings for Crampas himself. Innstetten is emotionally constipated, and Effi probably wanted to be reminded of a time when a man truly desired her, and to read words of passion.

Did Innstetten have a choice?

Yes, definitely. He says he has no choice, but that’s because of the importance he attaches to following social rules and being seen to do the right thing. In his conversations with his friend, he even admits that he probably doesn’t need to do what he’s doing, but his justifications are all about what people will think of him, not about his own feelings. He kills Crampas and discards Effi not because he is hurt or outraged, but because he thinks that it is expected of him.

Are there any events in this final section that make you feel outraged? Is that how Fontane wants you to feel?

I wouldn’t say ‘outraged’, but I certainly felt that the way Effi was treated was unjust. She committed adultery, yes, but the coldness with which her husband and parents banish her and cut her off from her own child is hard to take. I get the impression that Fontane did want us to be outraged. Innstetten killed a man, a far worse crime than Effi’s, but he followed the social rules of the time and so gets rewarded. Effi’s parents – at first, anyway – think more of protecting their social status than of supporting their only child.

Is there a villain in this piece?

Not really, and I think it’s one of the strengths of the book. The characters all play a role in the tragic outcome of the story, and some of their actions are pretty despicable, but ultimately Effi’s fate is decided more by the absurd social norms that govern the characters’ actions. So it’s more society that is the villain.

Discuss Effi’s reaction to her mother’s accusation “You brought it on yourself”.

Effi seems completely accepting of her fate at the end of the book. She knows she did wrong and never tries to shirk personal responsibility. It makes her very attractive as a character, especially since it is so clear to the reader that the punishments against her are unnecessarily harsh. Fontane lets the events speak for themselves, and I sympathised with Effi even more because she didn’t complain about her fate. By the end, like Crampas, she almost seems to welcome death.

The lot of the real-life Effi, Elizabeth von Plotho, was a much happier one. Why do you think Fontane made the outcome for Effi much harder?

I think that Fontane wanted us to feel outraged at Effi’s fate. The people in the book who are the most genuine and kind-hearted either get crushed, like Effi, or have little status, like Gieshubler. Meanwhile those who follow the rules while being blind to humanity are rewarded for it. I think there’s a real commentary here on the prevailing social order, and Fontane probably made the outcome much harder in order to make her more clearly a victim of that social order.

Were you surprised by the ending?

No – as I mentioned in week 2, the back cover of my edition more or less gave away the ending. It was also foreshadowed quite extensively all through the book. The pleasure for me in this book was not about surprises or twists in the plot, but about the way in which Fontane gets us to identify completely with the characters, and explores subtle themes through his skilful use of detail and symbolism.

Do you think you would ever reread Effi Briest?

I’m not a great rereader – there are so many new books to discover! So realistically, probably not, but I can certainly see that the book would deserve a second or third read. Thanks to Lizzie and Caroline for introducing me to it!

German literature month readalong – part 2

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:53:02 +0000

It’s the second week of the Effi Briest readalong, hosted by Lizzy and Caroline as part of German Literature Month. Here are Caroline’s questions and my answers.

What strikes you most in this novel, what do like or dislike the most?

One thing I like about the novel is the gradual building of tension through little details. Everything is pointing in a certain direction and building a sense of inevitable disaster. This is not a novel that relies on twists and turns in the plot – the enjoyment comes from the thoroughness with which the story is told and the characters are drawn.

Do you think Fontane likes Effi? Whose side is he on?

I think Fontane definitely likes Effi and despises Innstetten. I think that Effi represents the way that free, childlike innocence and naturalness gets stamped on by men like Innstetten who are so concerned with rules and social correctness. As a reader I am certainly on Effi’s side, and it seems to me that the author intended this. She’s not perfect, of course, and her faults are discussed by some of the other characters, including her own parents. But overall she’s certainly a lot more likeable than Innstetten.

What do you make of the story of the Chinese and the haunted house. How would you interpret it? And what about Crampas’ interpretation?

I agree with Crampas’s interpretation. Clearly he has the ulterior motive of undermining Effi’s trust in her husband and making her more vulnerable to his advances, but still I think his interpretation fits with Innstetten’s character. From the very start of the marriage he is controlling and patronising, seeming to view Effi as some kind of project. Even on the honeymoon, where he takes her to a whole string of Italian art galleries, it feels as if he is trying to “improve” her. He treats Effi like a child, and she behaves like one with him in the early days, seeking his approval and trying to be “good”. To me it fits in with Innstetten’s character that he would manipulate Effi with ghost stories.

Descriptions are an important part in Effi Briest. How do you like them and how important do you think they are for the novel?

When I signed up for this readalong I was worried I would encounter long, boring descriptive passages, but this has not been the case. Every detail seems to be carefully chosen to create a specific effect. The house in Kessin is not extensively described, but the details we do get are very memorable and almost all spooky, for example the curtains in the upstairs room that swoosh on the floor and create the effect of feet shuffling around at night. It’s interesting to me that people are not given long physical descriptions, as they are in many novels of the same era. Most of the description is of places and events – with people, more attention is given to character and interaction.

What do you think of Crampas?

Whereas most of the characters in the novel are interesting and complex, Crampas seems very simple. He is what he appears to be – an ageing womaniser, quite charming on the surface but completely unreliable and uncaring. He manipulates Effi as much as Innstetten does, caring only about himself, not about the consequences for her. He can be kind and affectionate towards Effi, but I see this as just a tactic to part her from her husband and ultimately to seduce her.

What kind of mother is Effi?

I’ve been surprised at what a small role Effi’s child plays in the novel. I find it difficult to answer this question, because the child hardly ever appears. Fontane is selective about what he tells us in this novel, and it could well be that Effi has a lot of contact with the child “off-stage”. In the novel, though, she’s usually taken care of by Roswitha, and there are few depictions of mother-daughter time.

Where will the novel go from here? What do you think will happen next?

The back cover of my edition gives away more or less everything about the plot, so it’s not a surprise really. Maybe they think that with classic novels it doesn’t matter so much because people are aware of the plot already. Still, one thing I like about this novel is that it’s not about big surprises in the plot anyway. I think that even without reading the back cover, I’d have a good sense of where it was heading. But this inevitability doesn’t make me any less anxious to read on. I’m enjoying seeing how we get there and exactly what happens at the end, even though I know the general trajectory.

German Literature Month readalong – part 1

Andrew Blackman — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 03:26:47 +0000

I am participating in the readalong of Theodore Fontaine’s Effi Briest as part of German Literature Month. Here are my reactions to the first 15 chapters. Questions posed by Lizzy.

Q1: Welcome to the 1st German Literature Month Readalong! Had you heard of Theodor Fontane and Effi Briest before now? What enticed you to readalong with us?

This is my first readalong; normally I’m not much of a group joiner, and prefer to read what I want when I want. But I enjoy the blogs of the two organisers Caroline and Lizzy, so thought I would give it a try just this once. I’d never heard of Theodor Fontaine or Effi Briest either, so it’s all new territory for me!

Q2: Which edition/translation are you using and how is it reading?

I’m reading the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers. I haven’t read the introduction yet – I prefer to introduce myself to the book, and go back to read the official introduction at the end. One thing I do like about this edition is that there are informative notes at the end, but no footnotes in the text itself. I hate when fiction is footnoted – it makes it feel dry and academic, and interrupts the flow (I know I could ignore them, but I always have the instinct to follow them to see what I’m missing). This way is great – I can read and enjoy without interruption, but the information is there if I need it.

Q3: Is the novel living up to your expectations?

So far it’s exceeding my expectations. I don’t generally read the classics very much, as I prefer contemporary fiction. I was keen to give this one a try after hearing what people said about it, but still I wouldn’t say my expectations were sky-high. I’ve really enjoyed it so far, and found myself being drawn into the story right from the beginning.

Q4: What do you make of Effi Briest and Baron von Innstetten. What motivates them? What do you make of their match?

Effi and Innstetten seem to be exact opposites, corresponding more or less to the two sides of human nature – the free and natural versus the socially controlled. Effi is presented as an innocent child from the very start, playing in the garden with her friends before being called inside to be informed of her engagement. Innstetten is a buttoned-down bureacrat, who behaves very correctly but shows no trace of passion or spontaneity. When he seems on the point of saying something real, he checks himself and says “Let’s drop the subject. I must watch what I say in future.” What motivates him is social advancement; what motivates Effi is fun and adventure. There is also the huge age gap; Innstetten is Effi’s mother’s old flame. It seems like a disastrous match.

Q5: How are you reacting to Effi’s parents?

I get the impression that they are trying to do the right thing. Marrying your teenage daughter off to a man twice her age may seem shocking today, but I think that in the context of the day, it would be seen as a good match for Effi. They are presented as loving parents, close to Effi and not authoritarian at all. They themselves are far from a perfect match as a couple, and I get the impression that they have learned to co-exist reasonably happily by reaching a truce. I think they imagine that Effi will reach a similar kind of understanding with Innstetten one day. I thought it was interesting how Effi’s mother tried gently to prepare her for marriage by making her more realistic – Effi had wanted to take a “beautiful and poetic” red lantern and Japanese screen to her new home, but her mother said “In life we must be cautious”.

Q6: Are there any secondary characters to whom you are particularly drawn? Any to whom you are adverse?

Gieshubler is a very sympathetic character, more or less the only person in Kessin who seems genuine and humane – most of them are concerned with social advancement.

Q7: Effi Briest was originally serialised in 6 parts. I’m assuming that its 36 chapters were published in 6 monthly parts of 6 chapters each and the novel so far seems to bear this out. How does the mood of the first part (chapters 1-6) contrast with that of the second (chapters 7-12)?

The first part is a time of innocence, in idyllic Hohen-Cremmen. Then it’s the honeymoon and the initial arrival in Kessin, when Effi is still enthusiastic. But chapter 7 begins with Effi encountering the cold light of day in an unfriendly house, with her husband absent. Innstetten’s absence is a foreshadowing of how Effi’s life in Kessin will be, and it’s when he’s absent for longer periods that she starts to see the ghost of the Chinaman and get truly terrified.

Q8: We finished our first reading at the end of chapter 15 or the middle of part 3. Where is Effi in terms of her psychological development and how does this bode for the future?

We’ve seen Effi’s increasing loneliness and nervousness, and have seen signs of her growing disappointment with Innstetten (for example when they’re travelling together and she complains that he just smoked his cigar and ignored her the whole time, “frosty as a snowman”). Nevertheless she still trusts and respects Innstetten, and feels that if she’s unhappy it’s her fault rather than his, and she needs to try to be better, to live up to his high standards and be worthy of him. It’s an interesting point in her development, and a good point at which to draw week 1 of the readalong to a close.

Thanks to Lizzy for the questions and Caroline for being joint-organiser! Look forward to the rest of German Literature Month. If you’re participating, please leave me a comment. Did you have any different reactions to the first 15 chapters?

“The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 08:47:29 +0000

This book is pitched just at the right level for me. I am interested in philosophy, but don’t have enough knowledge of it to be able to understand some of the more complex works. I tried Wittgenstein recently, for instance, and it didn’t take. But this short introduction to some of the basic problems of philosophy was very enjoyable. It’s almost 100 years old now, so probably the problems of philosophy are a little different today, but still I found the ideas in this book very thought-provoking.

Russell’s writing is as clear as a window pane, and he uses copious everyday examples to illustrate every point. He starts off, for example, by considering his desk. He is asking whether we can really know anything with any certainty, and shows that even the desk in front of him is not as apparently solid and unchanging as it at first appears. Its shape changes depending on viewpoint, its colour shifts with the light, its texture is smooth when viewed from a distance but rugged when viewed through a microscope, and so on.

He uses this to lead into Descartes system of systematic doubt, i.e. not believing anything unless he was quite certain it was true. Doing this, it becomes clear, makes us reevaluate many of the things that common sense tells us are true and real. How do we know, for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow? We may say that it has risen every morning in the past, or we may give an answer based on the laws of motion. But in either case, we have to ask ourselves whether we truly know that something will happen simply because it has happened that way countless times in the past. Russell give the wonderful example of a chicken receiving food from a man every day of its life, until at last the man wrings its neck. The chicken may have been reasonable to expect food based on past occurrences, but “more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Russell uses similar vivid examples and clear language to explain various philosophical concepts and ways of thinking, such as induction (which starts from the particular to arrive at other particulars or general principles) and deduction (which goes from general principles to other general principles or to the particular). He gives quick portraits of the views of philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, before finishing with a wonderful summary of the value of studying philosophy, in which he admits that philosophy still has large unanswered questions, but states that as a virtue rather than a flaw:

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense … Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

I like this idea of valuing the questions rather than the answers, of embracing uncertainty as superior to false certainty. The final paragraph is beautiful:

Philosophy is to be studied … because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The Secret Life of Pronouns, etc…

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:04:31 +0000

My Dad sent me an interesting article from New Scientist magazine recently called “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. It’s based on a book of the same name by James W. Pennebaker. Now the article was fascinating (I’ll get to it in a minute), but I just wanted to put in a quick plea first.

Please, no more books called “The Secret Life of…” The most well-known is of course The Secret Life of Bees, but we’ve also had in recent years, among many others:

The Secret Life of Lobsters
The Secret Life of Puppets
The Secret Life of France
The Secret Life of Cowboys
The Secret Life of Nuns
The Secret Life of Husbands
The Secret Life of Water
The Secret Life of Germs
The Secret Life of Wombats
The Secret Life of Plants
The Secret Life of Words
The Secret Life of Food
The Secret Life of It Girls

Yes, these are all real books. Have I missed any? Please add to the list if you know any more! I think you get the point, anyway. Enough with the not-so-secret secret lives, please. It was a great title for one book, but please don’t apply it to every noun in the English language.

Now, on to the actual article. It seems that our use of pronouns can reflect our psychological state. Pennebaker studied people who had suffered a traumatic experience, and discovered that the more they changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) to using others such as we, you, she and they, the better their health became. Pronoun use reflected psychological state. It was also influenced by gender, age, class and other factors.

I was also interested in the separation of language into “content” words and “function” words. Function words are the small, unobtrusive words that we naturally skip over. In the last sentence, for example, “the” and “that”. Our brains naturally focus on content – the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that describe the things we are seeing, doing or thinking. But the 450 function words in the English language account for an extraordinary 55% of all the words we use. So although the average English speaker has a vocabulary of 100,000 words and more than 99.9% of those are content words, the content words still account for less than half of all the words used. (The 100,000-word vocabulary stat also shocked me, by the way – do I really know that many words? When did I learn all these words and what on earth are they?)

I liked the example in the article of a note you find in the street: “He is around but I don’t know where. I will be back soon. Don’t do it!” Sounds like the start of a short story right there. In fact it is a sentence composed entirely of function words, and so without content it is impossible to understand. Function words require social skills to use and comprehend properly - if content words are missing, the listener often has to piece together knowledge based on context and assumptions.

What do you think of this? Are you interested in dissecting language like this, or do you prefer just to use it? And do let me know of any more “Secret Life of” books you’ve come across!

Congratulations, Julian Barnes!

Andrew Blackman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:48:03 +0000

So he won his Booker after all, the man who’s been shortlisted three times but never won before, and who once famously referred to the prize as “posh bingo”.

To be honest I’m a bit sick of the Booker by now – there seems to have been more publicity about it than usual, or maybe I’ve just been paying more attention than usual. But I’m very glad that Julian Barnes won the prize – well-deserved for an excellent novel, which I reviewed here.

“C” by Tom McCarthy

Andrew Blackman — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:28:46 +0000

Well, that was a bit different. Don’t come to this book expecting plot, character development or anything like that. The main character, Serge, is like a conduit for signals from the radio that his father is experimenting with when he’s born and that he himself develops a fascination with as he gets older. He’s not so much a character as a symbol of the effect of technology on the individual at the dawn of the radio age. The plot is episodic, and Serge cares so little about the outcome that as a reader it’s hard to muster much interest either.

Having said all that, I did find myself weirdly enjoying this book as I read it. It’s clear that Serge’s blankness as a character is intentional. He drifts through some quite amazing experiences, and yet never seems to be fully participating in them. He likes to see the world as flat, not three-dimensional, and so as an artist can never master perspective; it’s only when he’s in a World War One aeroplane looking down on the landscape that he feels things to be “just right, … just how things should be.” He watches as it “falls away, it flattens, it voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height, roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map… Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller…” He feels the machine to be controlling the landscape, as if “all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignment must proceed from the machine…”

Serge feels that such a flat world controlled by machinery is “just right”. His obsession with technology, drugs and sex prefigures many of the developments of the twentieth century, while remnants of the old, such as his Huguenot silk-weaving mother, seem to fade away, to be already a part of the past. It’s a poignant view of a time of great transition, comparable to the current transition to an increasingly digitised, hyper-connected world. Serge is a great observer of the world around him (in the war that’s even his role, not pilot but “observer”), and this extends even into his own life, so that he appears not to be creating the events of his life but merely drifting along observing them along with the reader.

Serge is born with a caul, traditionally a sign of good luck and safety from drowning, but also in this book the start of recurring symbols of obscured vision, such as the strange gauzy film that descends across Serge’s eyes after the death of his sister and necessitates a trip to a European spa town. The luck comes mainly in his inability to die amid the carnage of the war, despite being hooked on heroin as he’s flying and despite almost everyone around him getting killed, including the pilot of his plane (Serge survives by having his fall cushioned by someone else’s parachute – the parachutist also dies, but Serge is unharmed). The unbelievable luck even extends to him being captured as a spy and lined up in front of a firing squad, only for news of the armistice to come through just before the order to fire is given. The soldiers turn around to go home, and Serge calls out “Hey! You can’t do that. Wait!”

There’s a lot to chew on here, too much probably for one blog post. Parts of the novel reminded me of JG Ballard, particularly when Serge is in the aeroplane and the metal, technology and violence get fused with sexual excitement, making him ejaculate over the tail. Crash, too, was a novel that I enjoyed for its writing and its ideas, even though the plot and characters were scarcely believable. Almost every woman Serge meets inexplicably wants to have sex with him – maybe it’s that caul giving him luck, but it struck me as weird and unbelievable on the level of individual character. Much of the book was the same, and at times I became frustrated with the lack of traditional plot and character development. But it’s a novel about ideas, not so much about characters and their motivations. If read purely on that level, it’s an interesting and at times beautifully written book with plenty of thought-provoking ideas. I’m certainly glad I read it. If you’re looking for a plot that draws you in and characters you can root for, though, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.

New Booker rival announced

Andrew Blackman — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:02:38 +0000

I was interested to see today that a new Literature Prize is being established, possibly from next year, with the intention to rival the Man Booker Prize. I wasn’t aware of the controversy about the Booker apparently prioritising readability over artistic achievement. The two shortlisted books I’ve read so far have certainly had plenty of artistic achievement, and overall I think the Booker has done a good job over the years of selecting some of the best novels to read. I was also pleased to see that, on the longlist particularly this year, there was more diversity and inclusion of smaller publishers than usual. So as a reader, I’m not sure of the need for a new prize.

Nevertheless, as a writer, I’m all for the idea of more prize money being given out to writers So welcome to the world, Literary Prize! May I win you one day. On a more serious note, I do like the idea of establishing a standard of excellence, with the judging panel influenced by what they call the “French model” of a permanent “academy” of judges, rather than the Booker’s system of appointing quite varying panels each year. It’s quite old-fashioned, and some would say elitist, but I personally like the idea of a body of experts producing a view on the best novels of the year, especially since there are so many avenues these days for us to be more democratic and agree or disagree, pour scorn or praise on their decisions.

What do you think? Has the Booker lost its old priorities of excellence, as the Literature Prize founders claim? Is it a good thing for it to have a rival? Do you follow literary prizes closely, or tune them out? Do they affect your reading choices?