Better well read than dead

The Lessons

Katya — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:39:45 +0000

I tried to put an image of the cover of ‘The Lessons’ at the top of this, but wasn’t sure if I could do it properly and as Injera is away for a month I didn’t want to risk stuffing it up and her not being here to fix it! But on to the book. I loved pretty much everything about ‘The Lessons’, from the cover onwards. The characters were so well written, I could picture them really clearly. And I think Alderman did an amazing job narrating the book as a male. I thought her story about the double edged sword of financial freedom/independent wealth was an interesting one – Mark had all the money he needed, a property, the means to go on extended European jaunts etc, but in order to have these things he had to behave in a way that was appropriate to his family. A family who he had no real emotional connection with. I think we only met his mother, and there was clearly no warmth, empathy or closeness in their relationship.

I’m assuming if you’re reading this you have read the book, but if not spoiler alert….. I got a pretty big surprise when James and Mark got together. I thought that James was just another attractive thing that Mark wanted to surround himself with – I wasn’t surprised that Mark made a play for James but was very surprised when it was reciprocated. I think my surprise was there because the book was written with James’ voice and there had been no indication that he felt that way – or were there indications and I just didn’t pick them up? As far as I could tell he seemed perfectly, heterosexually, happy with Jess.

The only thing that I found a little unsatisfying when I got to the end was that I couldn’t quite work out what the lessons were that had been learned. Maybe I’ll have to do a little further reading to get other peoples’ ideas on that. I’m not feeling particularly insightful or creative at the moment, I think I’ll go for a walk and se if I can come up with any other ideas about the book!

Campaign Ruby – Jessica Rudd

Injera — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 05:10:31 +0000

It’s a little sad – isn’t it? – that the greatest achievement by a Rudd this year is a slender, formulaic piece of chicklit. I came to this book because I’d heard things like “people won’t believe that it was written before the whole Gillard thing”, so I was expecting prescience and political insight. I should have paid more attention to the cover – all girlish pink with a lipsticked title – than the author’s family name. If I’d opened it on the basis of “this is Bridget Jones in Australia!” rather than “oooh, I’m going to read between the lines and find out how Kevin really feels about Julia” then perhaps my reading experience would have been different, because… it really is sort of Bridget-Jones-in-Australia, with about as much political nous as you’d expect from that.

Like the Tropper book, this seemed more like a screenplay for a rom-com than a fully realised novel, although I say this from a place of relative inexperience with chicklit and whatever the “lad” equivalent is; maybe it’s all like that: stereotypical characters, improbable scenarios, predictable narrative arcs. It is probably just the right kind of book to read on the beach, preferably with a daiquiri. The alcohol would take the edge off impatience with the – can I be frank? – shit writing and pop-culture-refs bingo. In fact, three daiquiris and Ruby would be all I could handle.

Rudd is Australian, but she seems to have an alien way of regarding both Australians and the British. It’s as though she is foreign to both British culture and the local variant, but is trying to appeal to both. Ruby seemed to be an English woman written by somebody working from other people’s descriptions of young British women and Australia also seemed to be drawn second hand. I know I should be providing specific examples to back that up, but 1. I don’t have the book handy and 2. it’s the race that stops the nation day and I’ve been drinking. Not daiquiris, but gin cocktails, which might also account for my rancourous tone.

One of the things that really annoyed me was naming the local (Victorian) paper as the Herald. If Rudd wasn’t able to use The Age as the name, then she should have chosen a name that isn’t generally identified as that of the Sydney paper. Okay, to the plot. The email-that-goes-viral. Tick! The relentless name checking of designer brands. Tick! The improbable job offer. Tick! The whole basis of the plot – somebody from England with no experience (and an inappropriate visa) is offered a job in Australia. The geek who doesn’t match up to the handsome-but-ultimately-unsuitable lust interest. The XXXX t-shirt. The enormous font. The complete incompetence of the heroine that seems to be overlooked because… what? She has lady-shavers and microfibre cleaning cloths?

Okay, I actually hated this book. Hated. It took me very little time to read, which was its only plus in my opinion. I would go and see the film of Widower. I would not go near a multiplex showing a film of this.

August reading – How to talk to a widower, Jonathan Tropper

Injera — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:22:26 +0000

Our August reading is underway and we are continuing with the six week reading cycle. That means that our August reading is really August/September, but I didn’t have enough room in the heading for that level of specificity! Discussion will start on the 15th of September.

There are a number of links on the web for the book – I haven’t read any as I’m really enjoying reading books with very little prior knowledge of them, so I can’t vouch for their usefulness (having said that, I generally enjoy reading Pop Matters!).

If you still want to comment on Betty Crocker, or any of the previous books, please do!

July reading – Finding Betty Crocker, Susan Marks

Injera — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:21:55 +0000

Katya and I were both excited to receive parcels in the mail this week containing our next book, Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food. Book Depository really is amazing! In fact, we’ve both been doing some additional shopping there today.

We will start discussion on Betty on the first of August. I had a quick look at it today on the tram and it looks to be a fun read. A definite change of pace from Ian McEwan and David Mitchell. Enjoy!

‘Solar’ – Katya’s thoughts

Katya — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:18:27 +0000

I had very mixed feelings about ‘Solar’. I really enjoyed the actual storyline, however found the descriptions of physics, string theory, solar energy etc pretty trying – is it wrong to say I skim-read some bits? The other problem was that I found Beard to be a really, really unpleasant character. I like a flawed hero as much as the next person, but really, there was very little to like about him. He was selfish, appeared to have no morals or ethical codes and was mean to the people around him. And it was made pretty clear that he was physically unappealing as well. So how did he get all these women, I wonder?

I felt a tinge of misogyny from Ian McEwan – that although Beard was almost completely unpleasant on every level, this large number of women just wanted to love him and look after him and didn’t mind if they got nothing in return except thoughtless airport gifts, and if he had affairs with other women, just so long as he came back home to them. I know this wasn’t the case with Patrice, but she was really the only female character who stood up to him and showed a bit of backbone; however in the scene towards the end between Beard and Tarpin it appeared that she had been stringing along all 3 men she had been involved with. Certainly the situation with Melissa and Darlene was a bit of an everyman fantasy, two women on the go, separate countries, sex on tap, happy to have him despite less than ideal circumstances.

And – this contains a spoiler, so if you are intending to read this book or haven’t finished it yet you may want to skip this paragraph – in the final line of the book were we supposed to think that he had finally found love via his daughter, or was he having a massive heart attack? Given what he’d just had for lunch I suspect the latter.

So in summary I’m not so sure how I feel about the book overall. I THINK I liked it more than I didn’t, but I really struggled to get past how unpleasant Beard was – that scene when he ate NINE salmon sandwiches before doing his speech was pretty vile, among others. I look forward to hearing what others think.

May reading – Solar, Ian McEwan

Injera — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:09:39 +0000

Discussion on Solar will commence a little later than the first of the month, due to some reading backlogs. We’ll get a post up on June 15.

I won’t include any sort of a blurb here, in case you are like me and enjoy reading books with as little information about the story as possible. If, however, you like a bit of a taste of what might be in store, the publisher has established a website for the book.

For more information about Ian McEwan, a link to his site is in the left sidebar and if you are interested in buying the audiobook, the full text can be downloaded from a number of sources, including Audible.

Discussion: ‘Black Swan Green’

Katya — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:04:44 +0000

Given we’re nearly at the begining of May I was thinking about the best way for people to post comments on the book. Perhaps we could do it like this: Injera and / or I might post and people can comment there, and we could also do another post just with the title of the book where people can write their own thoughts. I am by no means a blog expert so Injera if you – or anyone else – has better ideas for where comments should go then please do go ahead and suggest. And don’t forget, if you have thoughts about the next book we can read then write them down in that section.

I’m hoping to have ‘Black Swan’ finished soon, but possibly not by the 1st as ‘Wolf Hall’ took me ages to read for some reason – not just becasue of the number of pages, I just found it pretty hard going. I used to love Elizabethan / Tutor history but I just couldn’t get into the book and I never really looked forward to picking it up. Apparently Hilary Mantel is currnently writing the sequel which I don’t think I’ll be in a hurry to read, awards or not. Anyway, I do look forward to reading peoples’ thoughts on ‘Black Swan’!

Apologies for the German version, but it was the best quality image!

So ‘Black Swan’ Is Locked In

Katya — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:50:31 +0000

I’m hoping I’ll love ‘Black Swan’ as much as I have loved his other writing. I also hope I’ll have most of it read by the begining of May, as ‘Wolf Hall’ is pretty long. My knowledge of Tutor history isn’t what it used to be – I thought that having watched ‘The Tutors’ on DVD might help, but given the show was more of a fictional history – a fictory, if you will – I don’t know how much it will help. And as I read I keep thinking ‘Is THAT the person Sam Neill played?’

But back to ‘Addition’, I agree with your comments Injera, especially about the whole ‘puppy’ incident. Not only did I find it a bit of a copout, but also highly implausible. And lots of peopel who have OCD didn’t have a traumatic childhood experience to pin their condition on, I kind of felt it fell into the ‘all people with schizophrenia are violent’ camp of mental health stereotypes.

Our next book

Injera — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:03:08 +0000

This book group is creaking into life – I’m sure once we get the hang of it we’ll get into a rhythm. Really! We’re generally very organised, deadline oriented people!

Our reading project for April is David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. We will start discussion as close to the first of May as possible! Please feel free to make suggestions for future reading over in the comments on the Reading Suggestions page.

Discussion is still open on our first book, Addition, so please feel free to follow this link to the post Katya put up and add your thoughts in the comments. It would also be great if you popped over to the Who’s Who page and shared a little bit of information about yourself.

Molly’s Questions

Katya — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:05:49 +0000

Thanks for your questions Molly. I know you are an old hand at blogging and you can whip out a pithy, witty post and comment on someone elses at the same time as feeding twins, cooking dinner. lobbying state government and paying the electricity bill, but being a novice I am thrilled that you have posted 2 comments on something I wrote, yay! Anyway, Injera and I are more than happy to take book suggestions, but we’ll have the final say. We also thougth that we would post the title of the book at the begining of the month, then discussion could begin on the 1st of the next month. And we don’t necessarily have to post the first comments, anyone can (I think? Or if it’s witten by someone else does it have to be done as a comment? So many blog questions! Like how do you set spellcheck on your posts for if you’re a lazy typist like me? And how do you do that clever compression thing where the first half dozen or so lines of your post are displayed and you click a link to get the rest of it? And how do you change your password, the one WordPress gave me is made up of all sorts of characters and I couldn’t possibly remember it. And how come I saw your second comment about personal blurbs when I went to write this post but couldn’t see it on the blog?) But I digress. We were thinking of having our next book as ‘Black Swan Green’ by David Mitchell. Injera and I both loved ‘Cloud Atlas’ and ‘Ghostwritten’ so are keen to read more of his books. I may be pressed to have it finished by May 1 as I’m just about to start ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel and am also keen to get stuck into the ‘True Blood’ books for a bit of adult vampire action (I think I deserve it as a reward for this morning finishing ‘Eat Pray Love’ for my real people Book Club), however maybe we should just set that date and see what happens.
I think your suggestion of having a little blurb about participants is a really good one, but I’m not sure whre we would put it, if we had them under comments we’d end up mising them. Injera, you are always full of clever ideas, any suggestions?