LETSBuzz Book Club 11th April 1999
This got better as it went along. Description of the wedding at the end of the book was very good. Gill was confused by the style, and also confused about which country the story was taking place in - this was not clear. Quite liked it. Nice story but irritating style.
Seán agreed on the sense of dislocation and had given up on the book for this reason.
Gill
A very silly book, but also clever and observant. A bit over-the-top. Gets more preposterous as it goes on. Set in South America and Yorkshire - and other countries. Worth a read - original and easy to read.
Gill
The Wishbones are an American wedding band. Weddings in the USA and UK are very similar - at least from the perspective of the band. An easy read. Features a 30 year old guitar player who still lives at home and has no time for
anything but music. He proposes to his girlfriend almost by accident.
Andrew commented that this book describes a subculture, i.e. semi-professional musicians, that seldom gets written about. Gill found some of the book all too familiar...
Gill
Andrew had also read this book and found it ‘completely stupid’. The book starts with a Yorkshireman who arrives in a South American village and starts to tell his life story to the people he meets in the bar. The story moves to Yorkshire and the author tries to transpose the magic realism style to Yorkshire. An easy read, an amusing diversion - ‘but it didn’t make me laugh‘.
Andrew
Another easy read. The premise of the book is that the author wrote a book called ‘Timequake’, didn’t like it and therefore decided to cut it and pad it out with other bits and pieces and aphorisms. Andrew didn’t really like this book.
Seán felt the book was more about the author than anything else, liked it.
Gill was put off by the style - didn’t like the use of two authors.
Andrew
This is about two characters - a 36-year-old man and an 11-year-old boy, neither of whom acts their age. Will, the man, acts like a teenager: he has inherited a lot of money and has no need to work. The boy is a bit of an outsider and acts older than his age. He moved to London from the country and has led a bit of an insulated life - not aware of the favoured trainers that should be worn, etc. The boy and Will form an allegiance. A typical Nick Hornby book but it lacks the usual driving obsession. A straightforward, and fairly weak, story. Inoffensive.
Caroline suggested Nick Hornby may be running out of steam
Andrew thought Nick Hornby was struggling to write about someone other than himself - but failing. The characters area bit two-dimensional.
Andrew
A first novel. The author is an Australian writer born in 1967. Novel has won several awards. Andrew was pleasantly surprised by this book - a good book with strong characters. Central character is an archaeologist on a quest to prove that the Portuguese visited Australia before Captain Cook. His dig is disrupted and he is led off on a completely different
tack. Tremendous atmosphere - strong sense of the desolation of parts of Australia. Recommended.
Andrew
Lots of nice photographs but not just a coffee table book. The book is about the life of William Morris, with a focus on the gardens and houses. It doesn’t go into great depth but is very enjoyable. William Morris, the book argues, was ahead of his time, very much into ecology, etc. Caroline was not convinced by this.
Caroline
Doreen did not like this book. It made her feel ill, and angry. She found it fascinating ‘in a repulsive way’ and thought it was horrible and written in a very voyeuristic and also non-critical way. ‘It makes you loathe and detest Japanese men’.
The men portrayed in the book are repulsive - while always polite. The book is written in the first person by a girl who is sold into geisha-dom. All the women in the town where the story is based are either geishas or part of the support structure for the geishas. The book starts in the 1920s and goes through to the war.
Gill felt that men, as well as women, were oppressed by these traditions. The book helped her to understand the Japanese culture and the expectations it places on men. Geishas are seen as respectable women and have some status in society.
Doreen
Doreen thought this book ‘a bit of a cheat’. She didn’t see the point of the author ‘trying to kid the reader that the characters in the book are real people.‘ For example there is a character that appears to be Wordsworth but is later shown not to be. The men are annoying ‘as is often the case in books written by feminists’. A nicely written book, an interesting read but a bit odd.
Doreen
This book was shortlisted for the Booker prize. The story is about a surgeon who goes to Crimea. The descriptions are strong and the book is atmospheric and very convincing. Also about the women, children, entertainers who are not actively involved in the war but form part of the ‘baggage train’ on the edge. . Doreen didn’t quite know what to make of
it. Another ‘ain’t it awful for women’ book. A bit gruesome. Extremely well written - as always with this author.
Doreen
An interesting book. Central character is a woman lawyer. There are several different stories in the book. First of all the description of her childhood, the suffering she, and her brother and stepmother experience at the hands of her father, a succesful lawyer but a very brutal man. Her brother’s development of mental health problems. Atmospheric descriptions of small town/rural America. And then another story of another clever but brutal man, an unusual family, a broken marriage and the battles over a child. And yet a third strand to the tale - but I don’t want to give away the whole plot. A
good read.
Jean
The frames have gone all funny - click to make it good.