Making Book on the Nobel

English bookmakers will give you odds on anything, and right now they're ranking possible winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. You will notice that Pointless Digressions is not on the list.  But here are some that are:

Coming in at 16 to 1: Philip Roth, Amoz Oz and Cormac MacCarthy. At 20 to 1: Alice Munro, Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan (yes!). Umberto Eco comes in at 25 to 1, followed by Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates and E.L. Doctorow, all more or less unreadable, at 33 to 1. Margaret Atwood is listed at 50 to 1, along with Michel Tournier (our choice) and Maya Angelou. At 56 to 1 we find a lot of names: Ursula LeGuin, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard (not bad), Colm Tolbin, A.S. Byatt, Milan Kundera, William H. Gass, Yevgeni Yevtushenko (whose day, when he was the cool young Russian poet, seems to have passed), Julian Barnes, and John Ashberry (could take it). Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient") is listed at 100 to 1.

The front runner (runner is an appropriate designation here): Haruki Murakami, one-time Tokyo jazz bar owner and marathon runner, born in Kyoto in 1949. Among his books: "The Thieving Magpie," "Norwegian Wood," "South of the Border" (he is a music buff) and "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." Odds on Murakami: 7 to 1.

And for all you breathless fans of "Fifty Shades of Grey," this news: E.L. James is listed at 500 to 1.

Place your bets.