Cramlington Book Club

Change of tack this month. In an effort to keep up with my blogging I am going to write this blog as I read it so I don’t end up with a big long thing to write later on and to give you my impressions as I go along rather than with the benefit of hindsight..... My initial thoughts upon receiving the book -  too much like 'Before I Go To Sleep' granted this is American and you don’t know if the husband is the bad guy but the way it flittered between timelines made me grant the parallel. Gut instinct I don’t like Amy – don’t like her pop quizzes, seems as though you are reading a magazine article rather than someone’s diary.  Too over romanticised (is that a word?) with the (literally) sugar coated first kiss and the single olive in joke. But then she is a writer for a magazine so could just be her style.  RANT ALERT! I really really don’t like it when an author deliberately makes you think a certain person did it when they haven’t. It just feels as though it’s a ...

Januarys book was a Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. A short book edged in black promising to be about a group of boys navigating sixth form, girls and exams. It turned out to be about a retired man looking back on his life We all thought how unsatisfied Tony, the lead character, was with his life although he was at pains to show that he wasn’t even to himself. He kept referring to how his daughter was fine and how he was still friends with his ex-wife and could go on holiday with her if he wanted to. It was though he was trying to reassure himself. There is a brilliant passage in the book about how being a realist turns out being safe and how time turns all well thought out decisions in to wobbly ones at best (sorry massively paraphrasing). The reader really got the impression that he thought he had lived a good life but now looking back he was slowly realising that he hadn’t and was loathe to admit it. We also discussed whether he couldn’t live the present life he...

New year – new beginnings It’s time I started blogging again. I think I have been putting off blogging for so long as there are so many books now that have been missed out. I’m just going to have to face it I am never going to blog all the books that have been read since the last time I blogged. This is a shame as I liked having a proper record of the book club and what we had read.  Amongst others, we have reviewed the following in my time in non cyber space; A Christmas Mystery Jostein Gaarder – Our annual Christmas book. I hated it. It was so very boring. Lots of people loved it however and imagined reading it to their children/grandchildren. It was interesting to read about the geography but I wanted maps!!! Northanger Abbey Jane Austin – I loved it, loved it, loved it but this book totally split opinion. We wanted to review one of her less popular books but we really ended up falling in to 2 definite camps between love and hate. House of Silk Ant...

A murder/thriller set in Paris in 1889 with a female investigative reporter who meets Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne and Louis Pasteur en route had potential to be a real page turner yet somehow I found that this and this book just annoyed me. It turned out that I wasn't the only one as a few of the group actually gave up with the story quite early on. I did finish it but found myself reading it just to get it finished rather than to find out who the murderer was. Everyone of us thought the book was too long. Despite this however I found there were still gaps in the story - how did she get out of the mental asylum??? Why was her encounter with Jack the Ripper condensed to something like 2 pages??? All of this was covered in the first few chapters and because of this we did find the beginning quite disjointed. After reading about Nellies struggles to become an investigative reporter in America we were suddenly whisked to the murky sewers of Paris researching sewer ...

So I missed the actual meeting as I had actually given birth earlier in the day (rubbish excuse I know) however I was kept updated with what score it was awarded and I have remembered so my New Years resolution has not failed yet. The book is very new and 'of the moment' being a TV Book Club book and (correct me if I'm wrong) a Richard and Judy book something that we had generally steered clear of before, purely because of their mass popularity and I had created the book club to try to enlarge my sphere of usual reading. It was recommended to me by a work colleague who hadn't actually read it yet so was a bit of a risk all round. The book is about a woman who wakes up everyday not knowing who she is due to an 'accident' a number of years ago. Everytime she falls asleep her memory is once again reset to her teenage/early adult years. Concept wise you immediately think of the film, 50 First Dates starring Drew Barrimore. The film is very far from the books take ...

At last a book where I have noted the score! New Years resolution? check! And a good job I did as it was a high one. I confess that I had already read this book and not being able to lay my hands on my copy decided not to re buy it and therefore not reread it. I remembered I wasn't too fussed at the time about it. It took me a while to work out which brother was which and I felt at times the book dragged on with the author being overly keen to describe the weather, the marshes, the monastery etc. What I, and a number of the group really liked was the fact that it was set in the Tudor Court where Henry 8th was King however it wasn't about Henry or his wives. Don't get me wrong I love those type of books (Phillipa Gregory anyone?) and have read several but to read about the dissolution without having to regurgitate the usual Anne Boleyn saga was refreshing. The characters at times were quite stereotypical - a brother who was ...

So I'm way behind with my blog and the book clubs most faithful follower (my mum) has threatened to stop following it unless I write something so here goes. Looking back I was surprised to see how quickly the books had stacked up. Surely 4 months hadn't gone by already? The first book I haven't blogged about was The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. I have to be honest I really didn't fancy reading this book to start off with. It was on 3 for 2 at Waterstones and just didn't sound like my cup of tea. In a nutshell, Edie finds a letter addressed to her mum during the war which opens up a can of worms as she retraces her mums past. In many ways this book was similar in format to our last book The Poison Tree. Modern day stops to deliver a story from a number of years ago that involves a murder and is still affecting todays characters in some way that we will have discovered by the end of the book. I commented in my last blog on how many books now seem to have to prese...