On the Booker Prize Website, free audio extracts of the titles of this year’s shortlist are available for download. The only problem is, that the downloads are for mobile phones only. LoL isn’t too good in using her mobile for anything other than telephoning and texting messages and so doesn’t really want to try this out (and probably wouldn’t really manage anyway).
But although she can’t listen to the excerpts – she can still read the books. And although, in an earlier post, she stated that she’ll probably never read any of the shortlisted books, she thought that, after all, she might put her beloved English classics aside for a while and give it a try. She picked three books, which sounded interesting to her: Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs (because of the “bookish girl”), Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency (because it “shows [Hensher] to be one of the greatest chroniclers of English life”) and Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole (because the author’s professional career a “a screenwriter, but also doing stints as a private investigator and English teacher” sounded intriguing). So, off to the bookstore…
The Lonely Librarian 