It’s been over two years since I first wrote about my Booker Prize book collection. I have managed to get a few more winning books since then but the reason I’m writing this today is to also share an update on how I’m catching up on the reading. My obsession with the Booker Prize, I found, hasn’t dissolved like I imagined. Although I have stopped looking at the Booker dozen or even the shortlist or even ambitiously resolving to read all six shortlistees before the winner is announced so as to see if the one I like ends up as the winner, I still get excited about the award. Maybe because it’s the only literary award that I’ve closely followed for over a decade now.

After a reading draught both in 2024 and 2025 (which perhaps has to do with the kind of work I’m doing), this year I cranked up the courage to pick up and finish a book. I started re-reading Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011) to my content. I had first read it in May 2015 and I had forgotten the story. I remembered bits and pieces but could not recollect what it was all about. This time, I followed it up with watching its adaptation for better recall. I watched the movie directed by Ritesh Batra and now two months since that rereading I remember a lot of it.

I plan to watch the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) next because that’s what I picked up after Barnes. It surprised me with its language and even the kind of book it was because I was expecting a thriller. (Yes, I don’t read about a book before reading it.) Its adaptation is directed by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

So it’s definitely a coincidence that I picked up Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975) next because it was already on my mind to be my next Booker read before I even knew the adaptation of Ishiguro’s book existed. My wife gifted it to me two years back and I’m again surprised at how mellow Jhabvala’s writing is. While I still believe that no one can beat how fluidly Jhumpa Lahiri writes, Heat and Dust was a pleasant and quick read.

I wrapped it up so fast that now I have two adaptations to watch, for even Heat and Dust was adapted into a Golden Palm nominated film, unsurprisingly by Merchant Ivory Productions.^[1]Jhabvala is better-known for her long collaboration with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.

Did I tell you that I’m on a reading marathon to finish all Booker Prize-winning books this year. I’m confident I’ll need more than a year but I’ve found I read better when I have a challenge in place. And what’s making me stick to the challenge is the self-restraint that I will not buy more books without reading at least 40% of my over 500-book collection. It’s a tough resolve but I’m enjoying it.

What I’m enjoying even more is how Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is making me feel. It’s a difficult read but one that’s so satisfying (with a new word in every other page) it’s unputdownable.^[2]No wonder it was awarded the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of Booker in 2008. “A book so good that it was awarded the Booker Prize three times.” This, after I almost put it down 5 pages in, but thanks to my personal rule of giving a book a chance till the first 50 pages. While reading the first chapter I realised I may have already watched a part of the Deepa Mehta adaptation because I remember Rajat Kapoor peeking into a perforated sheet… That was the kind of Booker Prize craze I had because the adaptation was released in 2012, even before I had the luxury of my own money.

Which finally brings me to my collection update.

Pending Booker Prize Winners (April 2026)

• P H Newby’s Something to Answer For (1969)
• Bernice Rubens’s The Elected Member (1970)
• John Berger’s G (1972)
• Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021)
• Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)
• Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2024)
• David Szalay’s Flesh (2025)

That’s three less books and two natural additions. I now own 54 of the total 61 Booker winners. Getting (finding?) those three first books will be a fascinating thing because I know they’re in limited circulation. I can buy those books today if I wanted to but there’s no fun in that. Maybe I should email Arundhati Roy who was good friends with John Berger.

Other than the Jhabvala, I found Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) at a used book sale and a former colleague gifted me Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song as a Secret Santa gift. Looks like my endorsement of the controversial practice is working. Unfortunately, my office didn’t celebrate a Secret Santa in 2025.