Now that cooler weather is settling in, the sun is setting earlier (Daylight Savings Time ends November 2), and the baseball season is wrapping up with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays playing in the World Series, perhaps you are looking for a book to settle in with by the fire and immerse yourself in a compelling tale. What to read? Book award lists are always a good source to consider when searching for a new read (and yes, there are so many books but so little time...best to focus on the best).
Each October The Man Booker Prize is announced. The Man Booker Prize, administered by the National Book League in the United Kingdom, is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the UK, the Commonwealth, Eire, Pakistan or South Africa. Past winners included The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, and Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie. On October 14th, Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, was selected as this year's winner; Adiga is just the fourth debut novelist to win this coveted prize.
The White Tiger is and exotic tale: born in a village in heartland India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.
The White Tiger is a tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.
Another suggestion is Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, the November selection of the Oakmont Book Group:
Duncan Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.
Fifth Business is a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.
Either of these books will be a wonderful treat. Expand your mind and your world -- read!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
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