Even More 'Readable' When the Price Is Right

First Oprah, now this.

While everyone else is congratulating Julian Barnes for winning the Man Booker Prize last night for The Sense of an Ending--at the end of what felt like a very long Booker season in which the most loaded term in public literary discourse was 'readability' (saluted by some as a genuine strength of certain books under consideration, decried by others as code for 'dumbed-down-ed-ness')--let's recognize Charles Dickens' latest triumph: Monday's post about his bicentenary and the Dickens readathon, immediately shot to sixth place (out of 84) in the list of all-time most-read entries at Jascha Writes. Dickens still has a way to go before he overtakes Jo Nesbø (who has long been in first place), but the Nesbø post has been up, collecting clicks, since March. (Soon it will be time for a 'sequel', a post about the eighth and ninth Harry Hole novels, The Leopard and Phantom.)

In that Dickens post I mentioned in passing that Amazon.com was offering some very attractive Kindle deals on Dickens titles in Penguin Classics. I recommended that you consider Pickwick Papers and the other Dickens titles to which you could surf from there. What I didn't realize at the time was that there are dozens of other Penguin Classics at Amazon prices the likes of which I haven't seen for close to three years.

In my experience, prices like this don't last. So if you take one of the links below and don't find anything special... well, that means the train has left the station. But, as of this writing, the prices for US Amazon customers are under one dollar. If you share any of my attachment to Penguin Classics, such prices for annotated editions with introductions, may just be too good to pass up.

From today's perspective, the Victorian novelist best situated to rival Dickens, is of course George Eliot, and her masterpiece is Middlemarch. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'; to put it quite differently, I can assure you that there is life after Silas Marner.

My second recommendation comes with multiple caveats. The edition in question is an abridgment, and the work is one that could be assailed from either side of the 2011 'readability' debate. I find it highly readable in the best sense of the term, and an edition like this one (or the old Viking Portable, with which I'm more familiar but which this one has supplanted) is a good way for first-time readers to test that assessment. The book is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--which I propose as a document of its own time (the 18th century) rather than of the centuries it treats. (Notes to the principal text, incidentally, are Gibbons' original ones; editor David Womersley provides a good introduction and the bridging passages.)

In each case, surf on from the initial link to find more.

Booker Season: Time for Julian Barnes?

Since even before Julian Barnes's latest book, the novella The Sense of an Ending, appeared in the UK last month, it's been making news, and now it's been so widely touted to win this year's Booker Prize (to be announced 18 October) that Alfred A. Knopf has advanced its US publication to 5 October, presumably to cash in on the transatlantic buzz about the book. Weeks ago it was already the most-mentioned current book in my Twitter timeline, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. Today's blogpost is just to make sure you've heard about it.

First, a word about the Booker Prize, a word addressed especially to those US readers for whom the Booker is not a constant reference point. The main prize, awarded annually since 1969, goes to a longer work of fiction written in English by a citizen of a Commonwealth country or Ireland or Zimbabwe. Some commentators in the US tend to downplay the Booker (full name, since 2002: The Man Booker Prize) because works by US citizens are excluded from consideration. (The group that established the prize in the 1960s felt that there were enough comparable prizes for which US authors received primary or exclusive consideration. There's now also a Man Booker International Prize, given for the body of a novelist's work, for which Americans are eligible; Philip Roth is the most recent winner.) Most readers internationally, however, would describe the main Booker as the greatest formal distinction that a novel written in English can receive. Past winners have included V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State, John Berger's G., Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (which has twice won the 'Booker of Bookers', a prize for the novel voted the best to date of all winners of the main prize) and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. In the UK both the press and the public follow each stage in the selection process with an avidity unequalled in the run-up to and awarding of any comparable prize in the US.

Julian Barnes (born 1946) has been on the Booker shortlist three times in the past but has never won. All of his work is inventive and highly readable, starting with his first novel, Metroland (1980), but the book that put him on the literary map was Flaubert's Parrot (1984), a free-wheeling novelistic account of events in the life of Gustave Flaubert, told from the perspective of a fictitious amateur scholar. In the 1980s he also wrote Duffy and three other crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, and for four years in the early 1990s he wrote the 'Letter from London' in The New Yorker.  He's published three volumes of short stories, and The Sense of an Ending is his eleventh book-length work of fiction. In recent years, Barnes has continued to confront what in a dustier author would be called themes of human shortcomings, but his perspective seems to have turned from wry to somber. He continues to dedicate his books to his wife, the high-profile literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008.

I've called The Sense of an Ending a novella, for want of a better word (it's about 150 pages in length, and it's best read in one or two sittings), although the cover of the US dust jacket calls it 'a novel'. The story contains some surprises, big enough so that readers are best off if they read no plot summaries beforehand, but modest enough so that some may be misled and expect bigger surprises than are in fact forthcoming. I think it's best just to say that it's told in the first person, from the perspective of a man a bit past middle age who is still sorting through the events of a lifetime in which he may not always have behaved nobly, events about which he still has something to learn. I would recommend that you read it not for its surprises but for its insights, its sensibility, its characterizations. In addition, if you're like me, The Sense of an Ending may lead you to examine your own life a bit differently. That's not what I was looking for in 1980, but in 2011 I'll take it.