Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Reader review/Booker correlation or not?

Yesterday someone tweeted it would be interesting to see whether the Booker Prize went to the novel with the most reader reviews (using the Guardian Books as the reader review source). I think this is rather unfair, since it's a British publication and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending was the hands-down winner on that site (only four of the six shortlist nominees this year are UK authors; the other two are Canadians).

So as the 2011 Booker is about to be announced, I thought I'd use another reader review site (Goodreads) and we'll just if there's a correlation or not. Here are the stats:

The Sisters Brothers - 4685 reviews
Jamrach's Menagerie - 2046 reviews
The Sense of an Ending - 1862 reviews
Pigeon English - 1730 reviews
Snowdrops - 1013 reviews
Half-Blood Blues - 581 reviews

Update: And The Guardian called it!

This just in via Twitter:



 Man Booker Prize 
The winner of the 2011  is Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending!