Booker Prize 2003

I note Suzy's previous comments re. dumbing down the Booker and having a judging panel of Sara Cox, Zoe Ball and Wes Butters. If they'd had that lot and kept in Grayling and Carey it would have been much more interesting.

How come we'll discuss the Booker Prize, but no one brought up the Stirling Prize? Bed-Z was ROBBED! Dance centre, my artse.

Do you all care about books more than architecture?

Oh wait, I didn't make a thread about it, either. Sigh.

Laura was the architectural expert, Kate :-(

Sorry. :-|

I've not read a single one of the Booker Nominations (the only one I was even tempted by was the Atwood) but he's got the scoundrel vote and the Potato Fear vote down.

He quoted Airplane!

Lucky Pierre. Kept asking my boyfriend what the author's name was because it seems so silly.
(Will email you latah, Marcello! Busy here!)

His speech was... wack, really, and BBC2 made a dog's dinner of it, too. I never read till stuff's in paperback (space/money constraints) and none of this lot appealed, maybe Atwood.

DJ Taylor, though, c/d? Points off for liking the Jam, obviously, but otherwise seems a righteous dude.

DJ Taylor reminds me of Nicky Campbell for some weird, unfathomable reason.

Yeesh, that is off-putting. Reminds me more of the tall one off Adam and Joe.

I liked the Clare Morrall book. If only she had been a drug addicted con-artist and spent her ill-spent youth in Mexico City rather than Birmingham, it all could have been different. She writes a bit like Kate Atkinson, thinks me.

I've only read the Ali and the DBC Pierre. The Ali could have done with a bit more editing, but the Pierre is pretty good in that it's a really READABLE Booker winner.

Booker speeches are always wack; winners are inevitably surrounded by more quality free booze than they've ever seen in their ENTIRE LIVES and are veh-veh drunk as a result. DBC Pierre was PISHED.

BedZED didn't win the Stirling Prize because the judges found it a bit Brookside Close-ish. I really, really could not see either D. Adjaye or J. Frischmann voting for it either (the latter MUST be cackling with revenge on Arch. tutors at Bartlett who failed her Part Two by this point)

i care about books more than architecture and i'm an architect - you read all the books marcello? really?

Yep, I bought three of 'em and borrowed the other three out of Streatham Library.

yeah i was at my mates and saw frischmann presenting an architecture show on bbc4 - whats with that? also whats with her new found sultryness? she was more like j-lo than the frischmann of old.

wrote about dbc pierre for brown wedge, have read three.

so what other books were more deserving of the nominations for the booker?

In listening to the BBC radio report about the presentation of this prize, the announcer twice said that the prize had been awarded to "an unknown author". The first time he said this, I thought, wtf they gave it to a work by Anonymous - how odd.

A short time later, he clearly and distinctly said the name of the author. How odd, I thought, that an unknown person should have a name. Then at the end of the news report, he repeated that the author was "unknown", at which time I irritatedly thought, little known, you eedjit, little known.

Watching the BBC coverage, was I alone in being shocked by all of these judges making a huge deal of having to read 120 books in four and a half months? There have been times in my life (without eye troubles and with more spare time) when my reading rate has been something like that, and that's without being paid to do it.

Well maybe they didn't have that spare time, ya big show off.

Next year's panel should clearly be made up of the unemployed and landed gentry.

That'll be Sara Cox, Zoe Ball and Wes Butters then.

Example of what I regard as bad faith from Guardian about the judges:

... More alarmingly, as they enthused to their video diaries about books by fellow residents of north London and Oxford, and the odd exile to the sticks, one couldn't help but play that old mental game, How Are They Related?

I may have have got this all horribly wrong, of course. No doubt the judges have concealed youths spent digging coal with teaspoons in the Welsh valleys or working the checkouts on the dawn shift at Grimethorpe Asda. But that is not what it looked and sounded like to me, or anyone else cringing at home who craved just the merest acknowledgement that someone outside the Woosterian Brahmin caste of literary London might read a book, or know good writing when they saw it.

It is any wonder - I could hear people on their sofas saying - that I haven't read a literary novel since school, if these individuals are the ultimate arbiters of books?

It's amazing how much snobbery ("I could hear people on their sofas saying") hypocrisy ("fellow residents of north London and Oxford") and frankly ill thought-out constructions ("Woosterian Brahmin caste") can be fitted into such a small space. Sure the judges are drawn from a literary elite, but since when did the Guardian oppose that orthodoxy in practice?

Well one writer can't really be held to account for the inequities of the employment networks that operate within a paper. OK, I just checked that piece and it's by Fiachra Gibbons, who is a really lovely guy and not a schmoozer at all. He always seemed like a sort of outsider when I worked there.