Well, then. Now I really want to read your book. Not.

From The Guardian:

'It is nice," said John Banville on Monday night, "to see a work of art win the Booker prize." He stood a little stiffly, the 59-year-old winner, blinking in the limelight and offering himself up as a monument to diffidence.

Diffidence, my ass.  He sounds like someone that I'd want to strangle.

His book is so totally off my TBR list.  I probably wouldn't understand it anyway:

Banville is called a "difficult" author, a label he wears, after 14 novels, with weary resignation. His books plunge through weighty philosophical debates and his language is, occasionally, arcane: "flocculent", "cinereal", "crepitant" and "velutinous" all make it into The Sea, a novel about a man who returns to the site of a traumatic childhood holiday after the death of his wife.