Thursday, September 12, 2013

So I Guess That Wasn’t the Last of the Man Booker

Okay, okay…we may have lied about this post being the last of the Man Booker Prize Olympics 2013 posts. In an egregious oversight, we forgot that there would be an ACTUAL shortlist and an ACTUAL Booker Prize winner looming on the horizon! Or maybe we were just that confident our predictions were spot-on? Mmnn…perhaps not.

Whether or not our concern for the shortlist results is purely self-centeredly motivated, the shortlist was announced on September 10th and we were quite keen to compare it with our own uneducated guesses. So for our third event, we present The Man Booker 2013 Shortlist Results!!!

Here’s a refresher on our predictions:

Alyssa’s Prognostication

We Need New Names
TransAtlantic
The Spinning Heart
The Marrying of Chani Kaufmann
The Lowland
A Tale for the Time Being

Susan’s Augury

A Tale for the Time Being
The Spinning Heart
TransAtlantic
Unexploded
The Lowland
Harvest

And the actual shortlisted are…

We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton Harvest - Jim Crace The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahir A Tale For The Time Being - Ruth Ozeki The Testament of Mary - Colm Tóibín

We both independently managed to predict 50% of the shortlist correctly, and with our combined powers of guessing we garnered a not-wholly-shameful 67%! It’s also worth noting that both of our predictions for the book that will ultimately take the prize are still in the running. We will be back in October when the prize winner is announced to see if one, or neither, of us will take the gold in this final MBPO (we thought it was time we had an acronym, don’t you agree?) event.

How about you? Did you make any predictions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

3 comments:

Debbie Rodgers @Exurbanis said...

I didn't make any predictions because I haven't read any of the books. I think Harvest will win though. The psychology of the title wll do it. You can quote me. ;-)

Susan said...

I like that way of choosing! If I bet on horses for Triple Crown races I'd choose a winner based on which name would make the best news headline.

Debbie Rodgers @Exurbanis said...

As good a way as any! I used to (in another lifetime) bet on horses by how "pretty" I thought they were & their names, and I won as often as my ex, who handicapped them, figuring for hours on his program. ;-)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...