Immensely pleasing to see the chairman of the Booker prize judging panel, on announcing its shortlist, admit the judges had to read an awful lot of waffle to get to that point.
“We occasionally felt that inside the book we read was a better one – sometimes a thinner one – wildly signalling to be let out,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah. It’s not that he’s opposed to long books – the man went on to emphasise that The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is 500 pages long, one of the very longest they read, and it proved brilliant enough to make it to the final six. What they were surprised by was the amount of woolly waffle that judicious editors had not pruned out of other books. “The chastening pencil has its role and subtraction can be as potent as addition,” said Appiah.
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