Nobel Prize for Literature 2007

This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Doris Lessing.

Author Lessing wins Nobel honour:

Wonderful news, great favourite of mine.

I'm really pleased, too.

Well deserved and glad she lived to see the day!

I see Reich-Ranicki thinks the prize should have gone to a more "significant" author in the English-speaking world, such as Roth or Updike, or to a non-English author. Harumph.

It should have gone to Roth - it should have gone to him long ago. I'll admit that the prize is a subjective thing, but sometimes it's just so obvious who deserves it that the collective intelligence of the world must shake its head when that person doesn't win.

Have never read anything by her.
Which of her books would be good as an introductory read?

For her crumbling-society-of-the-future scenarios (much more readable than they sound!), Memoirs of a Survivor or Mara and Dann. For her African novels, including as an introduction to the Children of Violence series (The Four-Gated City is superb), I would start with The Grass is Singing. Never really got into the Canopus in Argos stuff to the same extent so will leave it up to someone who did to recommend it, but I really enjoyed Love, Again and Summer Before the Dark. And once you have a bit of a handle on the way she writes and the kind of issues she looks at, The Golden Notebook. I think she's brilliant at capturing the emotional impact of scenes, characters, whole eras.

Canopus in Argos Series are my all time favorite books!
Can also recommend The Good Terrorist.
I am thrilled that she has won.

I was totally depressed and cried for hours after reading The Golden Notebook, I felt almost suicidical. After that experience I never read any of her other books, too afraid of my own reaction.