There But For The by Ali Smith

We were back at our old haunt, The Warwick, for Rachel's leaving do.  Lovely food as always and we even remembered to talk a bit about the book ... which was nice :-)

I think, overall, we were quite disappointed by this book.  The blurb on the back set quite an interesting concept and we were looking forwards to finding out why Miles shut himself in a strangers bedroom during a dinner party.  We wanted to learn more about his thought processes and how all the people featured in the book fitted together.  Instead we were faced with incredibly long chapters (the book has only five) and long, rambling, seemingly non-linear narratives which made it difficult to read in short bursts.  Or rather, difficult to remember what you've read in the last session and link it to what you're reading now.  The ending was also unsatisfactory, leaving us with lots of questions about Miles and every other character in this random book.

Concept: 7/10
Plot: 2/10
Ending: 0/10
Cover: 1/10
Page Turner: 1/10
Slap: The woman who owned the house and profited from Miles' stunt whilst losing her husband and mind in the process.

Overall: 2/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
• Above Average by Amitabha Bagchi
• Street Freak by Jared Dillan
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

We chose 'Above Average' by Amitabha Bagchi which we will be reading for the November meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Kate's house, 8pm on Wed 10th October.  Please bring along a book review based on the theme 'Christmas Lunch' as we will be choosing the book we'll be reading for the December meeting.

Fifty Great Short Stories by Milton Crane (ed)

This month's book was a little different, we chose 12 of the 50 short stories in this compact little book.  Details of the stories we read are in the previous post.  We had quite a good discussion about each story, some were, predictably, better than others but the standard was quite high across the board.  My favourites included:

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
Hunger Games - esque story of a nation where villagers gather for the annual lottery.  Well written story with a twist at the end.

The Giaconda Smile - Aldous Huxley
How could I fail to love anything written by this man!  Quite a long short story about a man who thinks himself a bit of one with the ladies and plays upon it.  One spinster takes him seriously with disastrous consequences.


How Beautiful with Shoes - Wilbur Daniel Steele
An American farming community is rocked by an escaped convict who kidnaps a beautiful local girl who mistakenly wears new shoes while running for her life - a mistake we've all made :-)

We marked this book a collective 6/10.

Our next book was chosen from:

• Tideline by Penny Hancock
• The Thread by Victoria Hislop
• Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh
• When a Crocodile eats the Sun by Peter Godwin
• Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

We chose 'Tideline' by Penny Hancock which we will be reading for the October meeting.

Our next meeting will be at The Warwick, 8pm on Wednesday 12th September.  Please bring a review of a book you'd like to read.

Empire by Jeremy Paxman

This month Louise fed us cake and tea (I'm sensing a theme) at her house where we discussed this month's book.  Hmmm, where to start? 

It provoked a lot of discussion about how proud we were to be British, how we felt we were represented to other cultures today and in the past and also how attitudes of British people had changed with regards to entitlement and blame cultures.  Most of this discussion wasn't directly related to the book, but it was interesting, we even got round to comparing the teenage pregnancy rates in our respective schools (apparently there's not much else to do in the country).  But the book was difficult to read, had no logical flow (it jumped about in time and space) and the wording so difficult to understand that you really had to read it a full chapter at a time (and the chapters were long).  None of us had finished the book, this is a first for this book group, and only a couple of us were interested in finishing it.  It felt and read like a text book, good if you were interested in the subject matter but painful if not.

Concept: 7/10 (we liked the idea of having a full history of the British Empire in a compact format)
Plot: 2/10 (however it jumped about all over the place)
Characters: n/a
Ending: n/a
Cover: 7.5/10 (good lion)
Page Turner: 1/10 (new category!)
Slap: Jeremy Paxman (though I doubt we'd actually dare)

Overall: 4.5/10

Again, we didn't need to chose our next book as we had already chosen 'There But For The' by Ali Smith a while back but it's only just come out in paperback.

We did choose the short stories to read from our next book '50 Great Short Stories' as we didn't think we'd manage all 50.  We chose 2 each and they are:

The Standard of Living - Dorothy Parker
The Shot - Alexander Poushkin
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe
The Other Two - Edith Wharton
Theft - Katherine Anne Porter
The Giaconda Smile - Aldous Huxley
The Chrysanthemums - John Steinbeck
How Beautiful with Shoes - Wilbur Daniel Steele
That Evening Sun - William Faulkner
The Tale - Joseph Conrad
The Man Who Could Work Miracles - H.G. Wells

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday 8th August, 8pm at Copa Bar.  Please bring along a review of a book you'd like to read.