Hello everyone! Thank you, all of you, for your wonderful notes while I've been away, I have missed you guys!!!
I'm just interrupting this hiatus to share with you what I won as second prize from Booklogged's "Winter Classics Challenge" : it's a wonderful miniature sheet of British Jane Eyre postage stamps. These stamps were issued on the 150th death anniversary of Charlotte Bronte who died in March 1855. They are just beautiful and I will treasure them so much, booklogged, thank you!
This lovely gift has prompted me to start a collection of memorobilia from the classics with an emphasis on leading female characters and women writers. There will be ample to choose from,I am excited! :)
I also received a fab "Last Line" bookmark in purple and gold and some copper page markers...they are just wonderful and soooo useful,thank you again, booklogged!
Hope to be back early April...so see you all then!
Astonishing, but exciting! Of the five books shortlisted for the Giller Prize, Vincent Lam's, "Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures" was the only one I have read and to be perfectly honest I didn't think it was prize worthy, but I am perfectly willing to eat crow and do a reread. Also, I am hoping that this recognition will help boost sales of his other important book, "The Flu Pandemic and You: A Canadian Guide" that he wrote along with Colin Lee.From the Globe and Mail:A collection of 12 short stories about a quartet of University of Toronto medical school graduates has won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize for excellence in English-language Canadian fiction.Torontonian Vincent Lam, himself an emergency-room physician, received the $40,000 prize and a small bronze statue at a lavish, televised gala at Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel last night. His book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, a debut work, beat out four other finalists -- two women and two men -- for Canada's richest literary prize. Each runner-up receives $2,500.In their citation, the three Giller judges -- former governor-general Adrienne Clarkson, famed short-story author (and two-time Giller winner) Alice Munro, and novelist Michael Winter -- said "this series of interlinked stories is a profound and meaningful glimpse into a world which seems on the surface to be purely medical, but leads us into the metaphorical. The characters and the situations are unexpectedly bound together and make us, as readers, not just witnesses to, but participants in the world that has been created for us."
Dr. Lam's victory was a surprise. But then any other winner would have been a surprise, too, in what was easily the hardest-to-predict joust in the 13-year history of the award. Previous Giller prizes -- named after Doris Giller, the late wife of the prize's founder, Montreal-born businessman Jack Rabinovitch -- have gone to either well-established writers such as Ms. Atwood and Richard L. Wright, or to authors associated with larger publishing houses, like last year's winner, David Bergen, published by McClelland & Stewart, and the first winner, in 1994, M.J. Vassanji, also affiliated with M & S.
If any book could have been considered a "pre-game favourite" it was Mr. Hage's kinetic saga of a young man's violent struggle for survival during the Lebanese civil war. It is also up for this year's $15,000 Governor-General's Award for Fiction, to be announced Nov. 21. Dr. Lam's Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is bound to vault on to the nation's bestseller lists. A confidential study released last month by BookNet Canada, based on a survey of 650 retailers, found that a Giller Prize nod "increases sales more than any other prize in Canada -- twice as much as winning the Governor-General's Award for Fiction."
Last night's ceremony was hosted by Justin Trudeau, 34, the oldest son of Canada's 15th Prime Minister.
Ok, so the Giller Prize (Canada's equivalent of the Booker) will be announced at 10:00pm tonight. With five dark horses in the race, it is hard to choose a winner - will it be the novel of obsessive love that some reviewers have deemed a "female love story", or will it be the "young man's book" - a fast-paced collection of stories set in the ER? Perhaps it will be a "thriller" set in Beirut during the Civil War or will the book with hyperrealism, religious symbolism, schools and the horrid things that can happen in them and other themes so remniscent of Quebecois literature win the day and, let's not forget the book that "plays it really safe" and seems to have everything the judges are looking for...Which of these books are likely to win? I don't usually like to bet, especially when I haven't read all the books, but from the synopses, I would put my money on Rawi Hage's "De Niro's Game", however, I won't be at all surprised if Gaetan Soucy's "Imacculate Conception" takes the prize instead.
Culled from the Globe and Mail:Indian writer Kiran Desai won Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize Tuesday for The Inheritance of Loss, a cross-continental saga that moves from the Himalayas to New York City.
Desai, daughter of novelist Anita Desai, had been one of the favourites for the $93,000 prize.
Born in 1971 and educated in India, England and the United States, Desai published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998.
The 35-year-old, who was considered to be among the front-runners for the prize, held off the challenge of five other nominees, including the favourite Sarah Waters for her novel The Night Watch.
The other finalists were In The Country Of Men, Hisham Matar's semi-autobiographical first novel about childhood in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya; The Secret River, Kate Grenville's tale of life in a 19th-century Australian penal colony; Carry Me Down, the story of an unusual boy, by Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland; and Mother's Milk, a portrait of a rich but dysfunctional family by English writer Edward St. Aubyn.
**Picture:
Winner of the Booker Prize, Indian author Kiran Desai displays her book after a ceremony at The Guildhall in London. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
