Last Orders by Graham Swift

An exciting meeting at Susie's newly renovated house (it's gorgeous), it's a shame the book didn't excite us more.

This book won the booker prize in 1996 so personally I was expecting grand things.  It's quite a quiet book, small and understated.  It tells a simple story of a group of friends, one of whom dies, it goes into their past and then skips to the present.  There is no great twist, no earth-shattering ending, just more and more reveals about these people.

We found it quite hard to distinguish between the characters at first, all are introduced at the same time and most are old men with families so it took a while for us to learn their names and remember what we know about them already.

Concept: 4
Plot: 3
Page Turner: 3
Ending: 3
Cover: 5
Who to slap?  The author or Vince
Would we recommend? 0/5
Better as ... ashes

Total: 3/10

I got to choose our next book (again!) hope it will be better than this one.  It's 'Half Bad' by Sally Green (available on kindle and paperback from 3rd March).

Our next meeting will be at Jen's house on Wed 12th March.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

I shall start this post by saying that only 1 out of 4 of us finished this book (and we think she cheated by listening to it on audio book :-)), so that speaks volumes.

A few of us had read some of Bryson's other books so his writing style isn't totally to blame on why we just didn't like this book.  It was mostly to do with the reminiscing about America in the 1950s, something we couldn't relate to at all and the fact that not much happens, but what should we have expected from an auto-biography?  It's a list of anecdotes, some of which are amusing, some of which I think you had to be there (or alive in 1950s America) to appreciate.  It just didn't do it for us.

Concept: 5 (an auto-biography is an OK concept)
Plot: n/a (we don't think this is applicable to biographies)
Ending: 2
Cover: 4
Page Turner: 2 (see my above comment on how many of us finished it)
Who to slap?  Bill Bryson (of course)
Where's the cheese?  The thunderbolt kid, the link between the name and Bryson is tenuous at best.
Would we recommend? 0/4
Better as a ... TV documentary about 1950s America.

Total: 3/10

Our next two books will be:

For February: Last Orders by Graham Swift
For March: After the Party by Lisa Jewell