The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

Christmas seems like months ago and it was great to catch up with the girls at our usual haunt, most of us had read all of this book which is very good considering December is usually a busy month for everyone.  This book started of as a bit of a mystery around a disappeared professor but it turned into one of the most mind-tripping books I've ever read (in a good way)!  The discussions on quantum physics and philosophical topics left most of us struggling but if you glossed over those, this book was great.  It had a slow beginning but I was flying through it towards the middle and the ending came far too soon.  Some of the details seemed a bit contrived, for example to add a bit of danger the ex-FBI agents appeared and started hunting the main characters, but thinking about it, why didn't they go after their bosses or other people involved in the project rather than trying to track a book down across the world?  I liked the mix of love story and sci-fi but I was frustrated by the ending and after discussing it with my fellow book-worms it seems it could be taken several ways.

Concept: 9/10
Plot: 7/10
Ending: 7/10
Cover: 9/10
Page Turner: 8/10
Who to Slap: Drippy Heather
Where's the Cheese: Adam & Eve linkages

Overall: 8/10

We have changed the way we are selecting our books, instead of voting on them we are putting all suggestions in a hat (yes, we borrowed Jen's actual hat) and drew one out at random.  We are hoping this means that we get to read some random books which may not have won in a vote.  The suggestions were:

• The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
• A Dark Encounter by Roland Vernon
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Prophecy by SJ Parris
• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

We randomly chose 'Bel Canto' by Ann Patchett which we will be reading for our March meeting.

We also discussed our book of the year 2012, it came down to a tie between 'How to be a Woman' by Caitlin Moran and 'Rivers of London' by Ben Aaronovich, it went down to a final vote and 'Rivers of London' won!

Our next meeting will be at Jen's house on Wednesday 13th February, 8pm.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich

This month we met at my house to celebrate birthdays: Rachel's and our book group's!  Yes, we have been going for four years now!  Jen made a beautiful cake and while we all enjoyed it we discussed 'Rivers of London' by Ben Aaronovitch.

This book was a murder mystery/police/comedy/magic thing-a-mi-bob.  The main characters are two Met police officers who investigate magical mysteries, the style of writing is very relaxed, easy to read yet made us laugh out loud at points.  We loved the characters and the concept was very similar to the nursery rhyme mysteries by Jasper Fforde (who we also loved).  We did get a bit lost in the middle of the story where the action picked up and felt that the rivers plots was bolted onto the main murder mystery part, we preferred the murder bit anyway.

Concept: 9/10
Plot: 7/10
Characters: 9/10
Ending: 8/10
Cover: 8/10
Slap: no-one!

Overall Total: 8/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Fifty Great Short Stories by Milton Crane
• Solaris by Lem Stanislaw
• The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine
• The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The London Train by Tessa Hadley
• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

We chose 'The London Train' by Tessa Hadley which we will be reading for the May meeting.

Our next meeting will be at 8pm at Bar Copa.

I know that we voted on our book of the year 2011-12 at the last meeting but I've lost the bit of paper, can anyone remember who won?  I promise to be more organised soon :-)

January Meeting

Happy New Year!

We are entering the third year of our book group (three in April to be exact), how time flies!

This month we finally gave up on the Warwick Arms, it has turned into an eat-y pub so we skipped over the road to Copa Bar again which was nice and quiet.  We discussed 'Bed' by David Whitehouse.

An easy read with short chapters which were perfect for reading in short bursts.  We mostly liked this book - kind of - instead of this being a story of a man in bed it was more about the relationships around him and how his actions affected everyone.  I liked the way the brother was never named, which both threw the focus back on Malcolm yet not on him (I don't think that makes sense but I don't know how else to say it), everyone was defined by their relationship to Malcolm which begs the question, what would happen when he died?  We felt the characers could have been developed more, for instance, what role did the Dad have apart from building the massive winch?  No-one in the book was normal, yet I suppose a book about normal people would be quite dull.  Our biggest gripe was the ending, it was very sudden and didn't really conclude anything.  We had a really good discussion on this one, so much so, we came up with a new scoring system:

Concept: 8/10
Plot: 6/10
Characters: 4/10
Ending: 4/10
Cover: 9/10 (due to textured buttons and collar on PJs - thanks Rachel)
Who we would most like to slap: Mother

Overall Total: 6/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Solar by Ian McEwan
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
• The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh
• The Life by Malcolm Knox

We chose 'Rivers of London' by Ben Aaronovitch which we will be reading for the March meeting.

Our next meeting will be at someone's house (volunteers please) on Wednesday 8th Feb and our next theme will be Easter (as we'll be choosing the book to be read over Easter), please be as inventive with this theme as possible.