Booker Prize announced in 5 Days, Tickets Still Available

As I am not a citizen of the great Commonwealth (ironically wealth not properly in the possession of actual commoners, thanks Thatch), so I will never be elligible for the Man Booker myself unless Hugh Grant, Clive Owen, or Mr Darcy agree to marry me (finally); but I thought I'd let you know the prize shall be announced shortly.

You can still buy tickets apparently and more importantly, for you UK writers who are in London, you can get the inside scoop thanks to the exhibit, 40 years of the Booker, being held at the V&A (also known as the only museum in London Madame Mimi can be found in).

I haven't read any of the books on this year's short list, in protest of their excluding Rushdie from the shortlist this year. Yes Salman, I was behind you 100% with guns blazing to win your second Booker (Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Bookers for Midnight's Children). I'm a bit bitter that this hasn't happened. Any book with the word enchantress in the title deserved to go all the way.

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The sky is dark and grey with clouds who give no hope of rain. The brittle boned dead armies of the grass perish before a dusty dirt moat that surrounds a decrepit castle.

This is a castle that has been injured by time. The roof is open and exposed, caved in like a fractured skull. The spiral spine has broken steps and missing vertabrae. The eaves hangs about its face like an uneven beard framing a mouth whose front door is loose on the hinges.

Sitting on its sagging and distended tongue is a girl in a dress of white embrodiered with dark red flowers, perhaps peonies because peonies would suit her exotic looks, but they are most likely tight lipped roses. She is sitting showing plump thighs and well-shaped calves and ankles. Her knees are bent and flawless. She is cradling a child in her empty arms, gently patting its buttocks in the cup of her delicate porcelain hand as she hums from behind a veil of her jet black hair.

She thinks she is dead because she sees that the barley is still high, because the sheep are stenciling their hunger into the grassy hillside. She thinks she is dead because the baby birds over her head are sending their demands into the sky and their poor mother in her hurry has dropped all her shopping except for one lone earthworm who had suffered such a shock that he was as slack as a piece of string in her clutches.

She was one of the great prides of the Shin family. Like all the Shin women she was beautiful. She would, like her elder sisters and her mother add another parcel of lands to the great Shin farm by marrying well. She would bear many children; boys who would grow into mythic men and girls who would bloom into rose hipped goddesses.

She was still so young and yet, promise clung to her like dew. Already she would singlehandedly increase the size of the Shin family farm by double, enough to make the farm almost a kingdom of its own. Her main suitor was the only son of the hard-working Chung clan.

In a year they would have married, but Shin grew impatient with each meeting. She had desires beyond land and increasing fortunes. She was quite innocent. She did not know where her desires would lead her.

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Taking a few pages from Henry Miller

I recently got my mitts on a book by Henry Miller with an appendix that originally appeared in an article entitled "Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale".

I decided to compile my own list, in no particular order.

The Books that Have Influenced Me the Most

1. Miguel Angel Asturias, Mulatta and the Fly
2. Jean de la Fontaine, Fables et Contes
3. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
4. Edith Hamilton, Mythology
5. Jerzy Kosinski, Painted Bird
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
7. Yusunari Kawabata, A Thousand Cranes
8. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
9. Miguel de Unamuno, Mist
10. Isabel Allende, House of Spirits
11. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
12. FUP, Jim Dodge
13. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy
14. JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
15. C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
16. Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Gray
17. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
18. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
19. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
20. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
21. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
22. George Orwell, Animal Farm
23. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
24. W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories
25. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
26. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
27. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
28. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
29. Alexandre Dumas Pere, Le Comte de Monte Cristo
30. Alexandre Dumas Fils, La Dame aux Camelias
31. Aesop's Fables
32. Jose Saragamo, Blindness
33. Margueritte Duras, La Douleur
34. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
35. Cervantes, Don Quixote
36. Lady Murasaki, Tale of the Genji
37. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme
38. Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
39. George du Maurier, Trilby
40. Zola, La Ventre de Paris
41. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
42. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
43. Anais Nin, Delta of Venus
44. Anais Nin, The Complete Diaries
45. Khaled Hosseni, The Kite Runner
46. Boccaccio, The Decameron
47. Homer, The Odessey
48. Plato, The Symposium
49. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
50. The Perfumed Garden
51. Federico Garcia Llorca, Feder
52. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Voyage au bout de la nuit
53. Ovid, Metamorphoses
54. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
55. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
56. Albert Camus, La Peste
57. A Thousand and One Nights
58. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
59. Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
60. Michael Bond, Paddington Bear
61. E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
62. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
63. Thomas Malory, La Mort d'Arthur

There are many more, but I guess I'll stop there for now...

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The Inner Child Outs Exuberence

It always amazes me where used bookshops keep their children's books.

While Calvino and Joyce, Miller and Faulkner, or Rabelais and Proust get prime front of store spots; E.B. White, Jean de la Fontaine, and Roald Dahl get stuck at the dead end of narrow alleyways lined with tall bookshelves. A passage so cramped I began to understand how dental floss must feel.

Still, now that I'm embarking upon the great endeavor of writing a children's book, I wanted to scope out some of my lesser-known competition. What I didn't expect was that the journey would remind me of what I loved to read when I was a child.

When I was seven years old my father took me to Paris where my parents unofficially "lived" since they traveled so much for work. My first memories of the Eiffel Tower, The Arc Triomphe, or any other major tourist site are most easily recalled from the much later age of 9, when I was soooo grown up that my only interest in Paris was MTV and that I could buy Madonna cassettes to bring back to Africa with me.

Only one vivid memory has stayed with me all these years. My first trip to Shakespeare and Co. where I bounced on the bed much to George Whitman's delight, unaware that while I feared bedbugs they didn't really exist unless you let them bite you, you were safe - except they did exist and I was in my childish ignorance probably scaring them for once. After a good jump, my father bought me my very first English book, The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White.

Thanks to Madonna and a stint of schooling in the States, I eventually did read the book in its original language; but before I could read in English I stared at the very simply illustrated book cover and imagined what might be happening inside the book I couldn't read. In my mind the swan holding the trumpet under his snowy feathered wing played in smoky jazz joints and incited soldiers to charge forth towards victory - each time I glimpsed at the drawings inside I made up a story and upon seeing real swans refused to believe that they didn't all have a trumpet stashed away under their wings and that only stagefright (a condition I thought plagued all swans) kept them from honouring me with an impromptu concert, even when I gave up both of the ends of my baguette to encourage them.

To see this book again, now that I am older and have read some of those grown up books, gave me such a feeling of joy. It seemed in that childish place in my heart that book was still vibrating with its story. Despite all of my fanciful imaginings the story I didn't imagine brought back all the stories I had. I saw again what I described to my father as the special neck exercises the swans did in order to be able to play long notes; me mimicking the motion as I circled the desk in his study.

It might seem like a strange idea to take your child to a book store in Paris, but don't let the language barrier stop you. If the cramped alleyways seem troublesome, turn it into part of the adventure.

Your stay in Paris might be a week or two, but a good book is a journey that takes a lifetime.

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