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]
