Seachanges - my lists and progress

This post is cross posted at 51 stories

I always have my eye on Orange Prize Winners and lists and so being part of The Orange Prize Project is an absolute pleasure. There is no ‘must’, I just read the books anyway. The project officially starts this week, on 1 April. So far we have only had a long list for 2008 and I am reading some on this list, but I won’t comment any further as suggested until the short list has been made public. Apart from a few included in the long list and not to be revealed as yet, I have read a good few of the winners and shortlisted ones over the years, at least one in each year except for 1999 (what was I doing?), including:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007, winner), reviewed.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2007), reviewed here.
Digging to America by Anne Tyler (2007), reviewed here.
The Accidental by Ali Smith (2006)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (2006), reviewed here.
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2005, winner)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (2005) reviewed here
Small Island by Andrew Levy (2004, winner)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2004)
Unless by Carol Shields (2003)
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (2003)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002) reviewed
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2001)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
Larry’s Party by Carol Shield (1998, winner)
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve (1998)
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (1997, winner)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1997)
Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler (1996)

What am I going to read in 2008 that I have not read yet? On my list are:
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (shortlisted 2004)
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (shortlisted) 2006)
The Colour by Rose Tremain

In addition, I am reading or am planning to read some that so far are only on the longlist, but who knows?
When we were bad by Charlotte Mendelson
The Gathering by Anne Enright

And maybe some more…

Terri - intro and progress

Hello all - my name is Terri and I live in Portland Oregon. I know quite a few of you from other places - Library Thing mostly. Thanks, Wendy, for inviting me to participate. Challenges are new to me and my reading has expanded so much because of them. Though my biggest challenge is not to get stressed out about the challenges!

I hadn't even heard of the Orange Prize before LT, but I'm so drawn to contemporary women writers, so this seems like a natural for me. Here's what I've read to date of the winners and from the short lists:

Fiction prize:

• Fingersmith
• The Poisonwood Bible
• The Weight of Water
• Alias Grace
• Accordion Crimes
• The Hundred Secret Senses
• Digging to America (which I detested!)

New writers:

• The Lizard Cage
  

I have a number of the winners and short list books very high on my TBR pile already:

• Half of a Yellow Sun
• The Inheritance of Loss
• A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
• The Night Watch
• We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Old Filth
• Small Island
• Unless
• The Blind Assassin (top of the heap)
  
• The Magician's Assistant

There are also about a dozen on the longlists that I've read but won't list them just now. I haven't quite decided how I want to tackle this -- I think reading all the winners is a must for me; and then perhaps adding at least one from each short list. I'll keep you posted!

(Later, edit) Ok, I've decided to read all the winners (both categories), at least one from each short list and at least one from each long list. This is in addition to those I've already read. Whew. Glad that's settled.

We seem to have some date issues - the front page of this blog shows it's Tuesday April 1st. I hope that's wrong, 'cause if it's right, I'm supposed to be at work!! And it shows the date of my post as yesterday's date. Puzzling.

I'm looking forward to sharing progress and thoughts with you all!

Marg's review: The Tenderness of Wolves

Originally posted on my blog in December 2006

As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Canada’s Dove River in 1867, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year-old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north toward the forest and the tundra beyond.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township—journalists, Hudson Bay Company men, trappers, traders—but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen, and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two missing sisters, a forgotten Native culture, and a fortune in stolen furs.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humour into a gripping historical tale, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery, and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the best books of the year.

This book is being sold in the bookstores here with a "Good Reading Guarantee", and that if you didn't enjoy it you could get your money back. If I had of bought it, for the first couple of hundred pages I would have been seriously considered taking advantage of that guarantee. It's not that it wasn't a good read, because it was...eventually. Maybe it was just the way that I was feeling, but every time I opened this book and read a few pages I just wanted to go to sleep. Once I got past a couple of hundred pages it was okay, and I no longer felt the need to sleep through the book but it did take me a very long time to get to that point.

Part of the issue for me was the sheer number of characters there were and how the action followed so many of them. We started out with the people who lived in the town of Dove River, particularly those who were directly affected by the murder of a French trapper. Then, the chief investigators enter the story - a couple of the upstanding gentlemen from the next town over, plus several men from the Hudson Bay Trading Company. Then a couple of other people vaguely connected to the case come into town as well. And then, everyone starts leaving again, in groups of ones and twos, ostensibly to try and track down the young boy who may or may not have killed the trapper. No one knows why he would do this, but still he has disappeared and that would make him appear guilty.

As many of the characters leave Dove River, they enter the wilderness in the middle of winter making travelling hazardous and drawing unlikely travelling companions closer together. Eventually the travellers arrive at a small religious settlement, where yet more characters and subplots are introduced to the book, and then again when they travel on to a small company outpost a little further on.

With the narrative following all the different characters as they arrive in Dove River and then leave in groups of two or three, the story switched too many times even within single chapters.

In the end this was an okay read. I think that there were probably a couple too many strands of the story than there really needed to be and therefore it was difficult to draw them all back into a cohesive finish, but there was certainly a good story to be told in there, and definitely signs of a good writer.

The Siege by Helen Dunmore

Originally posted on my blog in April 2006. You might be able to tell that this review was written as a comparison to The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons - one of my favourite books of all time!

Leningrad, September 1941. German forces surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged city of Leningrad face shells, starvation and the Russian winter.

Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin family's struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. What is it like to be so hungry you simmer your leather manicure case to make soup, so cold you burn first your furniture and then your books? An in spite of everything to resist...

The Siege is a brilliantly imagined novel about war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives. It is also a profoundly moving celebration of love, life and survival.

The main characters in this book are the Levins - Mikhail, a writer who is unfortunately out of favour with the Communist authorities, his daughter Anna who is a talented artist who works as a child care worker and 5 year old Kolya, her brother. Her mother having died during childbirth, Anna is both her brother's sister and substitute mother, and provider for the family.

When war is declared Anna is at the family dacha, working in the family vegetable plot, and just beginning a portrait of the mysterious actress Marina Petrovna. As war goes on, the little family grows as Marina comes to join the Levin's in their apartment. What is her connection to Anna's family? Is Anna right to feel the animosity for Marina that she does? Is it right to accept the gifts of food that Marina has brought with her that will in the end help keep them alive? Eventually, Anna's doctor boyfriend Andrei also moves in. She met him when he comes to tell her that her father had been wounded when working out at the defense line against the Germans who have encircled Leningrad, and who are gradually tightening the screws on an increasingly desperate population.

The aspect of this book that Dunmore did excel at were the pictures that she drew of the population as they went through the various phases of The Siege. The initial disbelief that they were at war, the feeling of still having to be careful about what you say even as you are working at the front lines to provide defense against the oncoming Germans, the repatriation of the children of Leningrad only to find them needing to be repatriated back to Leningrad when it turns out that they were in the way of the advancing Germans. As the war and the siege proceeds, the desperation becomes more intense as each person gets meagre rations of what is loosely called bread, and as the winter progresses, means of keeping warm. Eventually the only way for supplies to get in is over the Road of Life, over the frozen ice of Lake Ladoga. When the siege of Leningrad began there were approximately 3 million people living there...a million people died before the siege was lifted!

Where this novel didn't excel in my opinion, is in the relationships. Reading the back cover I was expecting that the relationships would be given a major focus, and yet they weren't. The book was a quarter of the way through before Anna and Andrei even met, and the relationship between Mikhail and Marina was mainly alluded to through the later part of the book. It was really a relationship from the past, as opposed to one that has been rekindled and explored with the reader.

My question to myself is really....if I had read this book before I read The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons, would I have liked it more than I did. I'm not sure what the answer is. All I can say is that The Siege pails in comparison to The Bronze Horseman, even despite the fact that the focus is different in the two books. TBH is all about the relationships, against the elaborate background of the siege in Leningrad, whereas The Siege seems to be about conditions in Leningrad with a nod to the relationships between the two couples in the book. TBH also seems to be better at giving some idea of the grandeur of Leningrad (now St Petersburg), the sights and sounds if you will. (I have had a desire to go to St Petersburg ever since reading TBH...for now I content myself with cyber tourism!)

I'm afraid it will be a long time before I attempt a book with a similar setting to TBH because there aren't many that will stack up against it! I should have known better, I really should have!

Key Dates - 2008 Prize

I thought it would be helpful to list these key dates for the 2008 Prize. Following the link in the sidebar to the Official Orange Prize website will give you additional information about the latest news.

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction longlist

18 March 2008

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction shortlist

15 April 2008

Orange Broadband Award for New Writers shortlist

8 April 2008

Shortlist readings

2/3 June 2008

Award ceremony

4 June 2008

Megan's Intro and Progress

Hello, everybody. I'm Megan and I blog at Leafing Through Life. I was so excited to see an Orange Prize Project considering when I first discovered the prize I considered trying to read as many of the winners and short list titles that I could on my own, so it's great to be able to try and accomplish that in community! I've read several already - unfortunately before I started my blog and started to review books seriously, so I haven't got many reviews of the ones I've already finished - but I look forward to reviewing my future Orange Prize reads and sharing them here.

Here are the ones I've read so far (in bold) as well as the ones that I've already got on my shelves (in italics) which will be the ones most likely to be read soonest.

2007

Longlist

Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley

2006

New Writers

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (Winner)

Shortlist

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

Longlist

The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory
Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

2005

New Writers

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Shortlist

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Winner)
The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman

Longlist

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates
Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill

2004

Shortlist

Small Island by Andrea Levy (Winner)
The Colour by Rose Tremain

Longlist

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Love by Toni Morrison
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

2003

Shortlist

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Longlist

The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

2002

Shortlist

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Winner)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Longlist

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

2001

Shortlist

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley

Longlist

The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi
Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

2000

Shortlist

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

Longlist

Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

1999

Shortlist

The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Paradise by Toni Morrison

Longlist

The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox

1998

Shortlist

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve

Longlist

Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

1997

Shortlist

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx
I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn

Longlist

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

1996

Shortlist

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

2008 Longlist Released

I saw that the 2008 Longlist was released for the Orange Prize - check out this list:

Anita Amirrezvani's The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review)
Stella Duffy's The Room of Lost Things (Virago)
Jennifer Egan's The Keep (Abacus)
Anne Enright's The Gathering (Cape)
Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)
Tessa Hadley's The Master Bedroom (Cape)
Nancy Huston's Fault Lines (Atlantic)
Gail Jones's Sorry (Harvill Secker)
Sadie Jones's The Outcast (Chatto)
Lauren Liebenberg's The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Virago)
Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad (Picador)
Deborah Moggach's In The Dark (Chatto)
Anita Nair's Mistress (BlackAmber)
Heather O’Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals (Quercus)
Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul (Viking)
Dalia Sofer's The Septembers of Shiraz (Picador)
Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y (Canongate)
Carol Topolski's Monster Love (Fig Tree)
Rose Tremain's The Road Home (Chatto)
Patricia Wood's Lottery (Heinemann)