It was announced this week that Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children has (again) won the Best of the Booker (this time for the 40th anniversary of the prize). I looked at the shortlist a while back – for some reason, just six previous Booker winners were nominated to be potential Best of the Bookers, which seems a bit unfair – but in any case, I couldn’t decide that any of them were better than the others, and didn’t vote.
But apparently 36% of the voters decided on Midnight’s Children, a pretty high proportion. The frustrating thing for me is that I know I’ve read this book, and have a very, very vague impression of it still left in my brain, but if I had to describe anything about it to anyone, I’d be utterly lost. Basically I’d just say “it’s about India”, a dismal summary if I ever heard one.
The thing is, there are hundreds of books that I can’t remember much about at all, even though at the time I found them absolutely fascinating. This problem is dramatically increased if I read a book within a day or two, so for that reason I limit my reading of books that I’m loving, so that they’ll stick better in my brain. But still, come back a few months later and there are so many cases where I could look at the cover of a book, know my opinion about it, but can’t tell you anything about the characters or plot. I find this rather distressing, I have to say, and hate to think that people will do the same to my books in the future!
Am I the only one out there who has this weird kind of book amnesia?
Manda, I have this all the time. It doesn’t usually matter how affecting a book or film is, I pretty much *always* forget “how it goes” so to speak. It’s most annoying. I think people have different abilities though, because I can’t forget songs, not at all, no way. They’re my thing, they penetrate my mind more deeply than fiction does, so I seem to always remember. Mind you, I know a *lot* of musicians that not only remember a lot of songs, but they are also expert at quoting from films and tv shows too. Maybe it has to do with how much you think? I spend a lot of time thinking (ummm, possibly read daydreaming) and I think that takes up the time I could spend learning lines from tv shows or remembering plotlines. If I read a book more than once, it makes more of an impression though. And if I read it when I was a child, even more so. Any psychologists out there able to enlighten me any? K.
Glad I’m not alone. Funny, last night in bed I was going over the plot of the book I’d been reading that day on the train, and then talked about it today as well (it’s a really good book!) so I wonder if those processes mean I’ll remember it longer …
[...] that happen to them in the course of the novel. If I read a novel I also have a vague chance of remembering something about it afterwards, but with a short story this is virtually impossible. And while writing a novel is an [...]
[...] keeping, and partly to remind me about the great books I’ve read, since I have a bad habit of not remembering books too well unless I actively think back on [...]