The Man Booker Prize

Welcome to the Reader's Den! This month's online book discussion will be The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. Feel free to participate and make comments.

Aravind Adiga was born in Madras, India in 1974. In high school, he and his family immigrated to Australia. Later, he studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities and published his first novel, The White Tiger, in 2008. The White Tiger received the Man Booker prize for 2008, an esteemed accomplishment for a first time author. Adiga was also a correspondent for Time magazine and has also written for the Financial Times, the Independent and the Sunday Times.

The White Tiger tells the story of a young Indian man named Balram Halwai, who makes it of the "darkness" by brutally killing his rich master. The story takes place over the course of seven days while Balram, the son of a poor rickshaw puller from a small village in Bihar India, writes daily letters to the Premier of China, Wen Jiabao. In these letters, Balram tells his deepest, darkest secrets and how he came to be an entrepreneurial success. We learn that Balram murdered his master, Ashok and stole a great deal of money in order to get where he is today. He justifies his wrongdoings by rationalizing that it is the unfairness of the Indian society that forced him to do it. Told in a sardonic wit, The White Tiger will make you laugh, while also revealing the corruption of both the rich and the poor and give readers a look at the many sides of modern Indian life.

Reserve your copy of The White Tiger through The New York Public Library Catalog or at your local branch. The discussion will take place over the next four weeks. I look forward to hearing from all of you!

Lynda P.

Bloc-notes. Officially, that’s French for blog. But like those other tech nouns that have also become verbs (to google, to xerox…), I’m not sure how “to blog” translates en Français.

I still have people asking for the book Comment Parler Des Livres Que L'on N'a Pas Lus? Actually they ask for the English version. Like many of the books I enthusiastically recommend, I have yet to read it. It is part of an ever-growing list. That list is called The Ever-Growing List of Soon-To-Be-Read Books. The fact that I haven’t read a book certainly doesn’t stop me from talking about it, recommending it, or blogging about it. I read all the major review sources, I listen to the opinions of library users and coworkers, and I try to keep up with my List. When titles come up in discussion, I sometimes say “Oh yeah, that one is my List” and sometimes I say “Oh, you have to read that one!”

The Man Booker Dozen has just been announced, adding twelve more titles to my List.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Berry
From A to X, by John Berger
The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie
Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

Some of these (Netherland, Enchantress of Florence) were obvious choices. I can’t wait to read Berger’s new one, due out in September. His About Looking and Ways of Seeing are two favorites of mine that I am constantly revisiting. I was surprised to see Child 44 on the list. From what I’ve heard it’s a very compelling read but definitely in the category of “airport fiction” and not “literary fiction”. Maybe it does transcend genres though. I’ll let you know once it gets to the top of my List. The Man Booker shortlist will be announced September 9th and the winner on October 14th.

Right now I’m 100+ pages into The Outlander, by Gil Adamson. Rather than give any in-depth plot summary, I offer you the first paragraph:

"It was night, and the dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling. They burst from the cover of the woods and their shadows swam across a moonlit field. For a moment, it was as if her scent had torn like a cobweb and blown on the wind, shreds of it here and there, useless. The dogs faltered and broke apart, yearning. Walking now, stiff-legged, they ploughed the grass with their heavy snouts.”

Set in 1903, it’s about a female on the run. You know right away why she’s running but you don’t known all the details so you get hooked right away into wanting to find out what exactly happened. Adamson’s debut novel has been compared to Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (sorry, not a selling point for me) and the early work of Cormac McCarthy (SOLD!). Vendela Vida and Jim Harrison offer kind words on the back cover, and I’d bump titles from the bottom of my Soon-To-Be-Read list to the top based on their opinions. I have yet to reach the end, but the beautiful writing alone justifies picking the book up, or bumping it towards the top of your own Soon-To-Be-Read List.