Christmas BookClub

The last bookclub of 2006 was held last night with mulled wine and mince pies for the season thats in it. We discussed all three books.

The Girl in Times Square received mixed reviews. I think it is a grower - slow to start but captures and holds your interest throughout - What has happened to Amy? Is Andrew involved? Will Lily get better? Will Spencer and Lily's love last? Will Lily's family cop themselves on? There is a lot going on in the book. Kathryn felt that Amy was forgotten about for a large part of the book but we felt that this was true to life. She was always in the background but life does go on regardless. Lily's illness was dealt with very well and in great detail. Paullina Simons is a great writer, especially with building characters who like real life are ultimately flawed people. Having said this I did prefer her other books - Tully, Red Leaves and Eleven Hours.

We all found Cradle & All to be an easy read but it left a bad taste in the mouth after finishing it. The premise seems to be better than the reality. It's a shame that James Patterson sunk into outdated stereotypical images of an Ireland from years past. Everyone who read it flew through it and it did hold your interest from start to finish but it was badly tied up with a weak ending. A central flaw I found with the book was the idea that Kathleen was supposed to be one of the virgins and in the end it was proven she wasn't yet throughout the book she was speaking to the devil, seeing the devil, had been exorcised and nearly killed several times by the sea and her mad nanny! I just couldn't get my head around that! The ending was very cliched and left it wide open for a sequel. All in all a very disappointing read. Although it did lead into a very long conversation about religion and belief in the Devil and God so it is a conversation starter!

Also there is a link between the two books - both refer to the crying room. A room in the Vatican where the newly elected pope goes and usually ends up crying due to the pressure of the world on his shoulders. In the Girl in Times Square this was mentioned also as the room in a church where mothers take their crying babies. The priest inferred that Lily's mother has never left that room referring to her manic depression.

Lastly A Man's Search for Meaning was only briefly touched on as Debbie was the only one to have started it. She would recommend it - look for it in the psychology section of the bookshop.

As it was Christmas we had a kris kingle so for the next bookclub we have decided to read our pressies and if there's time also the Scottish book suggestions for the next meeting so we'll have plenty to discuss at the next meeting. Sure what's Christmas about if only to stuff yourselves silly and curl up with a good book. Here are the kris kingle books:

History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky is a man who fell in love at the age of ten and has been in love ever since. These days he is just about surviving life in America, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbour know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago in the Polish village where he was born Leo fell in love with a young girl called Alma and wrote a book in honour of his love. These days he assumes that the book, and his dreams, are irretrievably lost, until one day they return to him in the form of a brown envelope. Meanwhile, a young girl, hoping to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, stumbles across a book that changed her mother's life and she goes in search of the author. Soon these and other worlds collide in The History of Love, a captivating story of the power of love, of loneliness and of survival.
[Image taken from Amazon.co.uk and synopsis taken from http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141019970,00.html]


All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve
A man escaping from a hotel fire sees a woman standing beneath a tree. He approaches her and sets in motion a series of events that will change his life forever. Years later, traveling from New England to Florida by train, he reflects back on his obsession with this unknown and ultimately unknowable woman-his courtship of her, his marriage to her, and the unforgivable act that ripped their family apart. Spanning three decades from 1899 to 1933, ALL HE EVER WANTED gives us a tale of marriage, betrayal, and the search for redemption. It has the unmatched attention to details of character, place, and emotion that have made Anita Shreve one of America's best-loved and bestselling novelists.
[Image taken from Amazon.co.uk and synopsis taken from http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/99132-ebook.htm]

The Lightworker's Way by Doreen Virtue
In the Lightworkers Way Doreen tells her own story of awakening her healing and clairvoyant powers, and her words will be an inspiration to the thousands of you who are on the journey of remembering your divine mission and discovering the natural spiritual skills that you were born with. This book will help you to reawaken gifts such as the ability to heal on a spiritual and energetic level and to give readings about the past, present and future. Doreen Virtue directs you in conducting healing sessions, heightening your psychic receptivity, calling upon the angels that are always by your side and opening your third eye.

[Image and synopsis taken from Amazon.co.uk]

Graham Greene

Graham Greene (1904 - 1991) is one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th century. His novels treat moral issues in the context of political settings. This collection includes three of his well-known books including The Tenth Man; Our Man in Havana and The Third Man. The Tenth Man begins in a prison in Occupied France during World War II. It is deemed that one in every ten prisoners is to be executed; lots are drawn to decide who will die. One of the men chosen is a rich lawyer. He offers all his money to anyone who will take his place. One man agrees. Upon his release from prison the lawyer must face the consequences of his actions. In Our Man in Havana, Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, was short of money, so he accepted an offer of $300-plus a month and became M16's man in Havana. To keep his job, he files bogus reports and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start becoming disturbingly true. The Third Man is Graham Greene's brilliant recreation of post-war Vienna, a 'smashed dreary city' occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates--a stylish thriller that hooks readers from the first to the last page.
[Image and synopsis of Our Man in Havana and The Third Man taken from http://www.ulib.niu.edu/rbsc/grahamgreene.htm ; Synopsis of The Tenth Man taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenth_Man]

Easy Food

Ireland's number one food magazine. Every issue contains a delicious mix of cooking tips, budget recipes, easy meal ideas and nutrition information.
[Image and synopsis taken from http://www.easyfood.ie/]

In honour of the Easy Food magazine, for the next bookclub we have decided to attempt a dish each to enjoy along with the book discussion.

Happy Christmas everyone and Happy Reading.

See you in 2007!

Launch of the Scottish BookClub

Ciara McGrath Wrote:
We really enjoyed our first bookclub meeting. It didnt really have much of a structure because there was so few of us, more of a chat really, but it was really interesting to hear other peoples opinions and it helped to see the characters in a different light than we maybe had before.

We spoke mostly about The Girl in Times Square because that was the one we had all read. We all really enjoyed this book and were kept interested by the complex relationships between the characters as well as the mystery central to the book. The illness of the main character was handled really well and I liked that she was not turned into an angelic character just because she was ill - her reactions and thoughts were very human. Although she was in a way the 'hero' of the novel, she didnt always make the right decisions or react appropriately. This made her seem a lot more real and I found it easier to sympathise with her as a result. We felt that the book
provided just about everything - mystery, romance, tragedy, scares - we laughed and cried.

The other book we talked about was Cradle and All. There was much less enthusiasm for this one. Louise found it readable but pretty mediocre. I personally really disliked it. I thought the characterisation was really cliched - particularly the Irish characters - at some points I actually gasped in disbelief at what I was reading! We also found the narrating character really difficult to identify with. She seemed smug and self-absorbed and not at all likeable. I also thought that the relationship between her and the priest from her past was totally unnecessary to the story -it didnt go into enough detail about their growing feelings for each other to add anything to the novel and gave me the impression that it had been tacked on to the edges as an afterthought to add a bit of sensationalism to the already ropey premise. (sorry, rant over...) - it has really put me off reading any more of his books.

My suggestion for next months read is "The Vesuvius Club" by Mark Gatiss.
I haven't read any of his novels but I went to see him speak about his new novel, the follow-up to this one, last month at Aberdeen University and he was really brilliant. He is one of the minds behind the League of Gentlemen, and has written for Doctor Who as well. Hopefully it should be pretty good :)

Lucifer Box, the hero of the Vesuvius Club, is a portraitist, gentleman and secret agent, a kind of Edwardian James Bond with a generous helping of Sherlock Holmes thrown in for good measure. It’s a cracking romp presented in true Strand magazine style with an appropriately evocative cover and illustrations throughout. Though a self-declared “bit of fluff” the novel has all the necessary elements that fans of such fiction will be hoping for: a suitably convoluted plot involving volcanoes and kidnapped scientists and lashings of pleasing period references. The Vesuvius Club is the first part of a planned trilogy taking the character through different periods, into the 1920s and the 1930s and onwards through the 20th century.
[Image taken from Amazon.co.uk and Review taken from http://www.readysteadybook.com/BookReview.aspx?isbn=0743257057]


Louise's suggestion is "The Secret Life of Trees" by Colin Tudge. It's a 'celebration of trees" apparently. Sounds pretty interesting.

The central theme of Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees is variety and the evolution of variety: variety in form, in adaptation, in kinds of dependence – most trees need to cohabit with soil fungi, some need insects, birds or fruit bats to pollinate them and spread their seed, some are parasitic on other trees. Tudge makes the British experience seem truly insular. He writes, for example, about ‘the wondrous Reserva Florestal Adolfo Ducke’, which covers a hundred square kilometres of Amazon rainforest. Two thousand times smaller than Britain, it has forty times as many native trees – 1300 species.
[Image taken from Amazon.co.uk and Review taken from http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=2296&cat=39&page=1]