LETSBuzz Book Club 23rd May 2004
Seán usually reads and enjoys O'Farrell's pieces for The Guardian and this book is really an extended one of those. About a man who tries to make himself more interesting by inventing a past for himself as a stand up comic. It's a bit thin, with not enough gags to support the book and some unconvincing story lines.
Seán
Not Eco's best, but pretty good. A historical tale of a man's travels through the Byzantine world and his meetings with (amongst others) some fantastical creatures.
Seán
Noticeably written by the same author as The Poisonwood Bible though not as good. It is well written though - a young woman drives through Cherokee nation and has a baby thrust into her care. A very enjoyable and humane book. Unpredictable.
Seán
This made Sean laugh out loud. The author is so obviously sensible he was driven to wonder if she was marriageable (before he remembered that he isn't). Sean absolutely loved this book. And now we all know what the 'Oxford Comma' is all about.
Seán
Sean thought the historical centre of this book absolutely brilliant. It deals with the Islam and Byzantine world in the 11/12th centuries. It's the story of the life of Omar Khayam (author of The Rubaiyat). An involved and complex history of a place and time that's not documented in general western history books. The context is that a modern American is in search of the original text of Khayam's book and this is the annoyingly weak part of the book, bracketing the hugely enjoyable middle section.
Seán
Terrific, well worth reading
Caroline
Bob thought this was very good. He came to it knowing nothing much about the author or her background so he approached it very much with an open mind. The first half of the book reminded him of J. D. Salinger (of whom he's a fan), telling of a fashionable and privileged young woman moving through academia and the literary world but feeling very uncomfortable with all that she's doing until she attempts suicide and ends up in a mental institution. The second half, her life and experiences in hospital is less interesting. It's starkly honest about her suicide attempts without being gory or sensational.
Bob
Jane had a bone to pick with all the people who'd recommended this book - she'd hated it, not liking Attwood's more science-fiction based writing.
Jane
Andrew liked Banks' early novels but felt he'd run out of steam in the early 1990s when he spread himself too thin by also writing lots of pure science fiction. Lent this one by a friend, it's non-fiction, a sort of travelogue about Banks' tour around Scottish whisky distilleries, with some autobiographical stuff thrown in along the way. Banks can certainly write but Andrew found there was too much else that he wasn't really interested in, apart from whisky - far too much about cars and motorbikes - and the whole picture that Banks builds up about his life is rather irritatingly smug.
Andrew
Set in 1950s New England, about an older teenager at an American high school and his attempt to win a school short story competition in order to meet his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway. To do this, he plagiarises a story by a girl from a school in the area, certain that his crime won't be discovered. The book starts rather slowly and Andrew found it a bit hard to relate to the literary intensity of the narrator and his schoolmates, a far cry from his Essex school of the late 1960s/early 1970s.
Andrew
An extremely well written and highly readable autobiographical book centred around the author's Mother's descent into short term memory loss in her old age. Descriptions of the very difficult situations that occur are quite harrowing but these are offset with excellent background material about growing up in an immigrant Jewish family in Liverpool, which soften the blow a little by contextualising her mother's life. There's also much about how some memory is hard wired into our brain, while other, possibly more 'important' stuff is easily forgotten.
Andrew
A very rich book, every short chapter is full of detail and every word seems to carry an important meaning. Very much Gill's kind of book because of the elements of magic and the spirit world and that it is set in a totally different time and different place to the one in which she lives. It's the story of Azaro, a spirit child in Nigeria. Spirit children would normally move on to another life/world quite quickly but Azaro decides to stay in the one that he's born into. Beautifully and descriptively written.
Gill
The frames have gone all funny - click to make it good.