Books/Sweet Booker

After three full days of rain, the sun is peeping out again and the air is autumn cool. The daylight doesn't penetrate the bedroom curtain until after seven in the morning at this time of the year, so Bob has been oversleeping when the designer alarm clock (Alessi) that he cherishes offers only a tiny beep, is easily turned off, and has no insistent repeats like a flashy digital model. A little more than two weeks (three in the States) from now we will be pushing the clocks back an hour, so the mornings here will be a briefly brighter, but oh those lovely short afternoons will begin. I do love the available hibernal possibilities when at two in the afternoon, you can say, well it will be dark soon so I may as well just curl up here with a book, some knitting or quilting, watch a DVD or an old TV series, with a huge choice endlessly rerun on my 500 channels of Sky-TV.  Somehow it doesn't seem right to say that in summer when two in the afternoon means another eight hours — yes, a full winter's day — of daylight left. Winter is such a gift to the lazy and sedentary.

This is Booker Prize Week here in London. Renamed the Man-Booker Prize a few years ago when the Man Group hedge fund took on sponsorship after the Booker food market company gave up their sponsorship. Up until a moment ago, I was about to say that perhaps we could take it as a good sign of financial green shoots, that Man is still around and able to sponsor anything. However a moment later, with all the world's knowledge available to me through Wikipedia, I have a much more interesting tale to tell.

Yes Booker is a food ("cash-and-carry") marketer, but its history involves controlling the sugar plantations of British Guiana where they made their money through the exploitation of indentured labourers. Then in the mid-20th century a Fabian took control of the company, implementing benevolent management which included founding the Booker Prize.

The Man Group, headquartered at Sugar Quay in London, was founded in the 1780s by a barrel maker who supplied rum to the Royal Navy — and we all know what rum is made from and the international significance of the triangular trade — so Mr Man became a commodities broker: sugar, cocoa, coffee — and Man still held the Royal Navy's rum contract until 1970! So how fitting that this week when the Man-Booker Prize was awarded is also the week when the Guardian declares, "Sugar is the New Oil as Prices Soar."

I have always felt directly responsible for the sugar shortage in the 1970s because I wastefully did not shake out every last granule from a bag of sugar one day, and the next week, sugar skyrocketed in price and there was hoarding and shortages afterwards. This time I have been warned, and I shall try to be more careful, but this time, my wastefulness is of a different order than a few spare granules. One of my favourite essays on food is Jane Grigson's "Introduction to the American Edition" appended to the British edition of my paperback of the classic Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book. The relevant line here is: "And American friends say, though I find this incredible, that you do not have as many kinds of brown sugar as we do." Yes Jane, incredible, but true. I once counted eleven varieties of sugar that were available, and that was a few years ago, before the options of "golden" and  "Fairtrade" and "organic" were added to the supply. Of course every recipe calls for a different sort of sugar —light muscovado, dark muscovado, demerara, molasses, icing, golden caster, white caster, light brown, dark brown, golden syrup, treacle — leading to a whole shelf of little canisters of unused sugars, slowly drying out if they are brown varieties. What's an empty nest baker supposed to do?

So we can see the Booker has a sweet history. The country becomes gripped with Booker fever in the weeks between the announcement of the long list and the announcement of the short list of the books actually in contention. Arguments all around on which were chosen, which left off, the quality of the year's judges, and of course the immediate betting odds for the front runner. The award ceremony is televised, although that has been cut down from a longer show that was formerly televised which cut between the dinner guests at the Guildhall and interviews with authors. In 2002, we watched it on TV with our friend Julia, a good friend of Carol Shields whose last novel Unless was a nominee. The Life of Pi won, but it was terribly exciting waiting for the big moment. This year the BBC's regular 10 pm news show merely cut away to the Guildhall to broadcast the announcement live. I haven't read a single one of the contenders this year, but DoveGreyReader has enjoyed her annual Bookerthon so there are no lemons among them. I'm not likely to ever read the winner Hilary Mantel or the A.S. Byatt because my experiences with both of them have been negative. I will read Sarah Waters because I have read all her books. The reader reviews on Amazon lead me to think that Wolf Hall is going to be another one of those, hyped by the critics, shrugged at by readers, books since already half the reviews are in the 3-star "I was really disappointed...." to the 1-star "this book is dreadful" range.

As for me, I have finished another of my 17th century Japan mystery novels which are okay, but I am reading them as a punishment to myself. I don't remember where or when exactly I acquired them, but I had seven of them, and they have been hanging around my Pile for years. The punishment part was to read them all this summer to remind myself not to collect piles of unknown books in the future. I have learned my lesson. I have finished six of the seven, donated them to the library book sale, and I will be more careful in the future. I used to read so many mystery series, but I have cut back quite a few. I will have to continue with Sue Grafton's Alphabet — I can't get to T, and skip past UVWXYZ. But I gave up on Patricia Cornwell years ago when her characters began passing from life to death and back again like afternoon soaps in the States. (No more Guiding Light. That was the one my mother watched.) I also decided that Kathy Reichs's books were at root boring, but Bob and I do love watching Bones on TV.  The TV Temperance Brennan is a lot more interesting than the novelised Temperance. Speaking of TV programmes, while the remaining few Kurt Wallander mysteries by Henning Mankell sit waiting on my Pile, BBC4 has been running a Swedish TV series using Mankell stories where Kurt and his daughter Linda work together on the Ystad Police force. They are terrific. We saw one or two of the Wallanders done by the BBC earlier this year with Kenneth Branagh in the lead. They were okay, but the Swedish ones are much much better. BBC4 began airing them again last night, so we can catch up with some of the ones we missed.

I also finished the third Jackson Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson. I was afraid that the trilogy was a three-book deal, and Jackson would disappear, but this one left lots of balls up in the air. Speaking of balls and air. The book event of the autumn has come and left us bereft. The event is of course the third, and tragically last, volume of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, awaited by all in the English language world who have had to wait extra years for these volumes to be marketed. We pre-ordered on Amazon months ago, the book was shipped last Friday, but not through the Royal Mail because of the on-going random strikes, but by City Link, a business delivery firm, that is hellish for residential deliveries because they require a signature so will not leave packages. The delivery cards they slip through the slot always say, "we'll redeliver tomorrow,"  but they never do. Their pick-up warehouse is in an industrial park at the edge of London; their phone number is always engaged, although you are told to telephone to arrange for a re-delivery or to pick the package up at the warehouse. So we have no assurance of when and whether the book will arrive.

If only I had a Kindle (sigh)! My son-in-law has sent a message that Amazon has decided to start shipping Kindles outside the States. I used one he was testing for his job last summer, taking it on a weekend away to Nantucket. I quite liked it, but for whatever reason — customs, copyright — the Kindle has not been available to customers in the UK. Waterstones sells a Sony reader with a list of available books that are laughable and that cost nearly the same price as the paper-and-print version. I can see a thousand good reasons why e-readers are the way of the future — from saving trees to enlarging the type size for old eyes (gee, I wonder why that immediately springs to mind) — but I would miss all the delights of cover art and page design that make a good book a joy to have in hand.