Booker and oblivion

[Ya Sam]

"Something to Answer For; Holiday; Saville. I'd lay good odds you can't even 
remember who wrote these books, never mind what year they won the Booker 
prize. To save you looking it up, I'll tell you. It was Percy Howard Newby, 
Stanley Middleton and David Storey. And, for that matter, I wouldn't mind 
betting that in five years time you will be able to add last year's winner, 
The Sea, to that list as it was memorable only for its forgetability." ....

"The Booker prize is a great way of promoting books and getting literature 
on to the front pages. But as a means of judging literary merit it's pretty 
much useless. This year's shortlist is a case in point. Black Swan Green and 
Theft may not be David Mitchell's or Peter Carey's best efforts, but both 
books are streets ahead of any of the six that were chosen and are 
guaranteed to have a longer shelf life than all of them." ...

"Booker juries are notorious both for fudging the result - choosing a 
compromise winner that no one really wants - and for losing all sense of 
perspective. How else can one explain otherwise reasonable people selecting 
so many books that have clearly been turned out by authors who appear to 
have memorised their creative writing classes by numbers?"



http://books.guardian.co.uk/manbooker2006/story/0,,1891191,00.html

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