Saturday 22 December 2012

Claus: The Legend of the Fat Man by Tony Bertauski

Our Christmas meeting was held at Hannah's house and it was a mini meeting of just 3 of us.

We liked this book, we thought the plot and the way it was written lent itself to being a film, it was a lovely festive story but we felt it was probably aimed at young teenagers because of the use of large font to emphasise passages and some of the phrasing.  It was an easy read but the editing errors let it down, very simple spelling mistakes which should never had made it to print made this book feel quite amateurish.  We liked the short chapters which meant it could be read in short bursts but some of them were just a page long and that added to the young feel of this book.

Concept: 9/10
Plot: 7/10
Ending: 6/10
Cover: 5/10
Page Turner: 6/10
Who to slap: The editor
Where's the cheese: How Santa Claus got his name

Overall: 7/10

We chose our next book from the following:
  • Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
  • May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes
  • The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes
We chose 'Warm Bodies' by Isaac Marion which we will be reading for our February meeting.

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 9th January, 8pm at Bar Copa unless someone wants to host.  As this is the first meeting of the New Year, we will be deciding on our Book of the Year 2012.

Above Average by Amitabha Bagchi

Novembers book group meeting was at Susie's house and we discussed 'Above Average'.  It was set in modern day India and followed the life of a middle-class student from school through to PhD in America.

We didn't like this book, we found it lacking in plot, full of cultural references to India which I'm sure would be funny if you were local to where the book was set but they went right over our heads.  We didn't really care about the characters and found it a struggle to finish the book and when we did we were disappointed by the ending, if you can call it that.  The only thing we thought had promise was the idea of writing a modern novel about the normal people in India, we've all heard of the poor and super rich and we were interested to hear about the average people.

Concept: 5/10
Plot: 3/10
Ending: 1/10
Cover: 2/10
Page Turner: 0/10
Who to slap: The Author
Where's the cheese: The uncomfortable passages where he read out his poetry about his girlfriend and her dark nipples.

Overall: 2/10

We chose our next book from the following:

  • North and South by John Jakes
  • The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
  • House of Riverton by Kate Morgan
  • The Lies of Loche Lamora by Scott Lynch
  • Princess Bride by William Goldman
We chose 'The End of Mr Y' by Scarlett Thomas which we will be reading for our January meeting.