On Monday evening we held our Booker Book Group discussion. We've been running this for a number of years now, and on each occasion I've wondered how we'd all feel about investing our time and the price of a hardback to investigate the longlist of 13 titles chosen by the Booker judges.
We've not really had a great opinion of the judges' selection in the past. Novels which make the grade for Booker have always seemed to have focused on grim, bleak subject matter in a challenging format!
However this year we had our biggest interest for the meeting yet - even before the longlist was released. And it proved an appealing and accessible collection of novels.
There were 24 people signed up for our meeting, so almost all of the books were allocated two readers to give us their evaluation ('Enlightenment', 'My Friends' and 'Playground' had only one reader each and for 'Creation Lake' we had to rely on a 'Guardian' review as the book wasn't published before our meeting).
By having more than one presentation for each book, we had a lot to get through in our time and it was fascinating to find that many of the novels had opposing viewpoints from our readers. It meant that discerning our favourites from the list was more difficult as we heard such a clear explanation of differing opinions for each title.
There were a couple of exceptions - four members of the group had read 'Orbital' and all enjoyed the title, recommending it highly for its subject matter and originality but with the caveat that it had no plot and 'wasn't really a novel'! And our two readers for 'Held' by Anne Michaels agreed that the prose, though beautiful at times, was largely impenetrable and the story disjointed, so neither of them recommended it.
After hearing all the reviews, we drew up our shortlist of the six titles which we felt should be considered for the overall prize. We selected the following:
'James' by Percival Everett
'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey
'My Friends' by Hisham Matar
'Wandering Stars' by Tommy Orange
'Playground' by Richard Powers
'The Safekeep' by Yael van der Wouden
Will the judges agree? They might choose 'Enlightenment' by Sarah Perry instead of 'The Safekeep' perhaps, we felt.
And the overall winner? 'Orbital' and 'James' both had the most supporters wishing it to triumph, but any one from our shortlist would be a worthy winner, we felt. It will be interesting to hear the judges' announcement on Monday 16 September to find out whether or not we're in agreement with their assessment.
Thank you for reading.