Read?

The Booker Prize "long list" finalists are named, and I have questions. For one, how do books that haven't yet been published make it on the list? I know that Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie write the kind of literary fiction that contests drool over,  but shouldn't the book actually be in print before it's eligible for prizes?

Judges actually had to sign a non-disclosure agreement before being allowed to read Atwood's The Testaments, a sequel to her 1986 The Handmaid's Tale. This tempts me to reveal the entire plot of that novel here when it's finally published in September, but I've already read The Handmaid's Tale and the prospect of another sojourn in Atwood's dreary dystopia doesn't tempt at all. There's also the fact that even if everyone who reads this blog read the spoilers I'd "ruin" the book for a number somewhere in the middle three digits.

And another question: one of the nominees is called Ducks, Newburyport, and it's a 1,000-page sentence. The book is apparently -- and I say apparently because there is no damn way I'm going to pay money to find out for myself -- an internal monologue of a middle-aged Ohio woman ruminating on all kinds of things in the world. The Goodreads blurb about it says it's "A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster."

I say it's nothing of the kind. If the author really wanted to indict "America's barbarity," then she wouldn't have written a pretentious and impenetrable 426,000-word sentence to do it. If she really wanted to "lament...the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster," she wouldn't have provided such a potent aid to bringing about the "sleep" part. Or killed a thousand pages worth of trees per book in doing so.

On the other hand, could it really sell enough copies to bother that many trees, even at a thousand pages a whack?

(H/T Dustbury)