Reading

A while ago I set myself a challenge of reading long listed and prize winning novels and recently I moved on to last year's Man Booker list. Honestly, after a pleasurable start I was finding it hard going and often not a little disappointing.

The pleasurable start came with the winner Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury Publishing). This is an original and clever novel in the style of older historical novels. Its main characters are the spirits of those buried in the Bardo cemetery who for assorted reasons have not moved on. Most are in denial of their deaths and they spend their nights wandering the graveyard going back to what they call their 'sick boxes' by day. We follow and get to know them and how they ended up in this limbo until the burial of Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie, changes everything.

I followed this with some others on the long list and really struggled with them. By the time I'd had to force myself to finish a novel by one well known writer I usually enjoy - I'm a fast reader but this one took me nearly ten days because I kept putting it aside because I couldn't bring myself to care about these self absorbed people - and then moved onto another novel, which I doubt I'll even finish, I was losing interest in my plan.

That's when a comment on my Facebook newsfeed reminded me about Ann Cleeve's Vera Stanhope novels - and sent me off on a binge read. Oh and as Ann Cleeves is a prize winning writer, too - she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (now known as the Golden Dagger) in 2006 (not for a Vera Stanhope novel, though) - she fits into my prize winners reading plan. I had read some of the Vera Stanhope novels quite a while back but then had lost track of them for some reason. Now I began from the beginning and I was hooked all over again.

I have long been a fan of the ITV series Vera (based on the character of Vera Stanhope from the novels) since it started. In the series Vera is played by Brenda Blethyn and I was intrigued to compare the TV Vera with the one in the novels. I wasn't disappointed. Although they are dissimilar in some ways - physically the Vera of the novels is tall, fat, unattractive and tends to dress in Oxfam clothes while no-one would ever describe Brenda Blethyn's Vera in those terms - to a large extent the TV version stays close to that of the Vera of the novels. For instance TV Vera's clothing choices are still not flattering and her behaviour is as eccentric as that of the novel character. They differ in that the novels explore the dynamics of Vera's team more than the TV series and we see things from more varied perspectives because we get into the heads of the team members. Not all of the novels have made it onto the screen and Vera and her team have grown and changed as it has progressed in ways not part of the novels (she's now a Chief Inspector while in the novels she remains an Inspector for instance and her loyal sergeant, Joe Ashworth, has eventually moved on). It doesn't matter because both TV series and novels entertain. I have thoroughly enjoyed both and was sorry to hear that this is the last season of the TV Vera.