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Book Group Archive
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Orlando - Virginia Woolf
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Saroo Brierley was years old when, out on a nefarious expedition with his older brother, he crept into an empty train and fell asleep. By the time he was able to get out of the train he was in Kolkata with no idea of how to get home. He lived on the streets for a while, had some very narrow escapes, then was picked up, sen tto anorphanage and after fruitless attempts to find his family was adopted by a couple in Australia. 25 years later, with only hazy and inaccurate memories of his train journey, he set about trying to find out where he came from and his birth mother. It's an incredible story, slightly marred by Saroo Brierley being at best a functional writer, it would have been so much better if he'd got a good ghost wroter to do the narrative for him. It has also been made into a film, called Lion, Saroo's nckname as a child, which a friend tells me is very good. It may be one of the few instances of a film being better than the book. Those reservations apart this is definitely well worth reading or seeing. -
I absolutely loved this book, I wasn't confused by the Triads etc but then I did live in HK for a while so it all seemed pretty normal to me! Unlike Mr HG I thought the weakest part of the book was Matthew,. John Lanchester is a fantastic writer and particularly good at giving individual voices to his narrators, which means that Matthew, who has basically a rather uninteresting personality, has a somewhat dull narrative tone. I felt it was a shame the book encded where it did though, I wanted to know what Tom thought of it all.
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Martin Eden is the story of a young sailor from Oakland who falls blindly in love with Ruth, the sister of a man he saved from a fight. Ruth is elegant, studying lierature at university, bourgois and rather patronising towards the working class, uneducated sailor who neverlheless loves poetry and has a burning desire to learn. Martin decides to make himself worthy of Ruth by educating himself and becoming a writer. The novel is about his struggles to be a success, rejection, the mind-numbing effects of too much hard work and the struggle to be yourself when all those around you don't believe you have it in yourself to fulfill your dreams. This is a book i'd never have picked up if it hadn't been chosen for one of my book groups and is a prime example of why I belong to them. I was completely caught up in it, it's written in a rather florid, muscular style whch I normally don't like but that didn't matter, it's one of those books where you're happy to have woken early because you've got something so good to read. I was devestated at the end. Apparently Martin Eden has been an inspiration for generations of aspiring writers. Highly recommended.
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By MisterHobgoblin · Posted
One day a cockroach decides to leave the safety of the wood panelling in the Palace of Westminster, head across the road and into 10 Downing Street. In the morning, the cockroach discovers he has become Jim Sams, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It seems the cockroach has made this metamorphosis at a time of national crisis - the population has narrowly voted to embark on Reversalism - a crazy idea of reversing money flow - and the Government is determined to deliver this outcome despite the manifest lunacy of doing so. This is obviously a parody of Brexit, although in one scene Jim Sams considers how Revarsalism might work when adopted by only one EU member state. Presumably this scene is enough to throw Brexiteers off the scent so they won't realise they are being lampooned. This is not great literature - although it is also not bad. The main selling point is the topicality and obvious speed with which it has been thrown together and published. Some of the details - the arrival of Boris Johnson, the attempt at proroguing Parliament, the expulsion of long-standing members of the Conservative benches for opposing hard Brexit - are barely weeks old yet they play a pivotal role in this novella. What is really depressing is the plausibility of the conceit that the Government (and perhaps President 45) are really cockroaches in disguise, running the world into the ground just for their own immediate self-interest. Does Boris Johnson lie awake at night and fondly remember his missing set of legs and his exoskeleton? The Cockroach is (hopefully) a quirk, a piece of ephemera that will forever look like an oddity in the canon of a literary giant. It probably owes a big debt to Kafka, and the metaphor and the aliases are very transparent. The ending will really bug you [can you see what I did there?]. But it is as good an illustration of the madness of Brexit and the frustration at the lack of any real backbone in the opposition - especially its leader - that you'll find. It is shows how significant an issue Iain McEwan thinks it is, that he is willing to put his name and his branding to something so obviously created at speed. ****0
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