Cramlington Book Club

Book 3 for Cramlingtons newest book club was A 1000 Splendid Suns by Hosseini . This was Hosseini's second outing the first being The Kite Runner which is now (unsurprisingly) a film. Most of us in the group had already read The Kite Runner, including me, however none of us had got round to reading this one. We all spoke so highly of the Kite Runner that we thought it would be worth giving this one a go. It was easily available in paperback and about average length. As with 'Runner' it is set in Afghanistan however this time focused on the lives of two women - Mariam and Laila with the uprising of the Taliban inter weaved expertly in the background. The title comes from a Persian poem called Kabul and is really worth reading. I only read it after I had read the book and found that it shed a whole new light on the book. As well as talking about the beauty of Afghanistan (which despite the devastation that is going on around them Hosseini does manage to portray) it a...

Book 2 for Cramlington Book Club was The Road . It was suggested by me as my auntie had just read it and had said it was a really good book but not one to read if you were feeling depressed. Nobody had really heard of it before and I wasn't able to provide much details other than 'it's by the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men and its about a father and son walking, presumably on a road, through America'. I wasn't feeling depressed and had in my mind some sort of Road to Perdition esk book (well they both had Road in the title!) so it seemed like a good idea - Ah the benefit of hindsight.... Its basically about a father and son in post apocalyptic America. It was an Oprah Winfrey book club book by Cormac McCarthy responsible for the aforementioned Oscar winning film No Country. Its a relatively thin book with short paragraphs so doesn't take long to read. That's the good news. The bad news is its very very grim. Not gory grim just depressing. Father...

When telling people which book I was reading for the book club I was surprised by the number of people who had already read it. Kind of like when you book a holiday to somewhere you have never heard of and suddenly everyone as been. Nobody had a bad word to say about it which is pretty rare so I was really looking forward to reading it. My auntie very kindly gave me a copy so I didn't need to buy it however it was widely available in Asda , Sainsburys (I told you we didn't buy food only books in Cramlington supermarkets) and Amazon stocked it quite cheaply. It was quite a large book - 500 odd pages but was a paperback, with short paragraphs and relatively short chapters. It was one of three, the others being The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who kicked the Hornets Nest known collectively as the Millennium Trilogy. I was intrigued to find out that Larsson died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2004. He lived an interesting life that can perhaps be said to be reflected...

I would like to introduce you to Cramlington Book Club. It has members that are not all related or previously known to me. It has had its first meeting and has even decided upon a book to review. More on that later. I arrived at The Plough, my local pub that I had chosen as a venue, to find one person already there! Yipee I wasn't going to be on my own, this might actually work! There were 4 of us in total, all female but varied in age. I had asked everyone to bring along either their favourite book or the one they were currently reading as a starting point for discussion. I had brought along Kept, a Victorian Mystery by D J Taylor . I hadn't read any by Taylor previously and wasn't enjoying the Dickens wannabe. It was however A typical of the type of books that I read - 3 for 2 at Waterstones / best seller list at Asda . This seemed to be the general reading fodder of the group and most of us had heard of the various authors that each liked to read. In the offerings of tho...

I'm the type of person who has to read the first page of a new book immediately after I have finished the last page of the one I was reading. If I am nearing the end of a book I will take two to work with me despite them both being doorstop sized hardbacks just so I don't have two stops on the metro without a book to read. It seemed logical therefore for me to join a book club. So how does one join a book club? Well I asked at the library and was told there was a waiting list almost as long as one of the aforementioned doorstop sized hardbacks. Hmmm . I was stumped as to where else to try until, by chance, I fell upon a small poster in my local Borders advertising their book club . Excellent. Well it was, for a short time until one month only me and one other person (the organiser and member of staff) turned up. The month before that the only other person who turned up was a man who claimed that the Iraq war was all manufactured by the CIA to keep them in jobs, that it was poin...