The BSFA short-list is out! And there are no less than ten novels on it, which is not so very short…
| Goodreads | LibraryThing | |||
| reviewers | av rating | owners | av rating | |
| Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke | 35802 | 4.33 | 1174 | 4.26 |
| The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin | 27370 | 4.00 | 1063 | 4.06 |
| The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson | 2667 | 3.97 | 252 | 3.90 |
| The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky | 1852 | 3.91 | 93 | 4.38 |
| Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth L. Powell | 896 | 3.95 | 57 | 3.65 |
| The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M. John Harrison | 370 | 3.70 | 66 | 3.60 |
| Comet Weather, by Liz Williams | 95 | 4.40 | 43 | 4.25 |
| Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus | 52 | 4.00 | 10 | 5.00 |
| Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood | 8 | 4.25 | 8 | 1.75 |
| Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh | 4 | 4.75 | 2 | – |
On my similar ranking of the 56 novels on the long-list, these ten ranked 1st, 2nd, 19th. 25th, 30th, 32nd, 40th, 48th, 54th and, er, 56th. (The 55th on the list ended up in the Short Fiction category.)
I tried to do the same ranking for the Non-Fiction category, but so few of the short-listed books have been rated by users of either LibraryThing or Goodreads that it does not produce much interesting information, except that Adam Roberts' It's the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? is way ahead of the rest.
I did put in nominations from the long-list myself. Three of my nomniees for Best Art made the short-list; two of my nominees for Best Short Fiction; one for Best Novel; and none for Best Non-Fiction.
I just finished The Prestige. My verdict is not trashy enough to be exciting nor difficult enough to be interesting.
I did like The Children’s Book and while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, I learned a lot from it and I warmed a lot more to Sassoon than I did to most of his contemporaries (it was on the syllabus of my World War I lit class at uni).