Cramlington Book Club

No getting round it The Goldfinch is quite a doorstop (over 800 pages) so I looked sharp, ordered the book the day after our last meeting and set about reading it the day it arrived. I even stashed it in to my hand luggage only suitcase when nipping to Mallorca for the weekend (how jet set does that sound!) Yes yes Kindle would have been lighter but I’m a fan of BOOKS! Unlike some weighty novels though this didn’t feel wordy and didn’t seem to drag. The book could be compartmentalised into clear sections, before the museum, the Barbours, Las Vegas, Hobie, Amsterdam, Theo’s monologue, which moved the book along nicely and didn’t leave you bored or skipping pages. That’s not to say it I breezed through it, it took me right up until the day of our meeting to get it read but it wasn’t painful the way some books can be. I did stop at around the 400 page mark and think how on earth is this 14 year old boy going to end up a man in Amsterdam by the time I get to page 800 but we got there i...

So I didn’t read this book as I was on holiday when meeting was on and despite being given the book for free I never got round to picking it up. I'm stuck in the middle of Huckleberry Finn and wasn’t really inspired to leave it for a book my mum gave up on less than half way through. It’s part of a project known as the Austen Project designed to update the works of Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice and Emma are receiving similar reworkings and are scheduled for release later on in the year. My mums biggest problem with the book was the fact it was modern – asthma, Range Rovers and IPhones all of which are so NOT Austen. I get her point but really that is the whole point of the re-workings to make them modern. If you can’t get past that point then really the book is always going to fail. To be honest it does sound like the type of book I normally avoid, not the fact that it’s a reworking but the fact that really if you take Austen away and stick it in the real world it’s kind...

Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan I have to confess, I have read, but didn’t love Atonement. I know McEwan is considered something of a modern literary genius but I just can’t wax lyrical about Atonement. Having said that it’s the only book I have read by McEwan, it was a few years ago, I would like to think I am more intelligent with my reading than I was back then and I’ve spent the last month being exposed to people on twitter quoting their favourite McEwan lines of which I was impressed; ‘A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended’ And so I went into this book really wanting to like it and appreciate it’s beautiful writing. To start with it’s a bit like a love story but with thriller potential. Then it peters out and becomes a love story without real direction but with a twist at the end that supposedly makes the whole book brilliant. Can you guess that for me it didn’t? I guessed early on that something was going on in the background with Tom...

I knew immediately who I would be when Book a Day turned to ‘Want to be one of the characters’. I would be someone from the Rutshire Chronicles by Jilly Cooper. You know, Polo, Riders, Jump and so on. Why? Well they all live glamorous lives reeking of champagne, expensive perfume and designer dresses, but most importantly the bad guy always loses, the underdog always gets their day and they always always get a happy ending. Its fairy tales for adults and I love it!

We immediately found ourselves comparing this book to other ones in a similar vein - Gone Girl, The Silent Wife, both of which we have recently read for Book Club The Silent Wife in particular had a similar female lead - isolated, didn’t have a job (or played at having a job), supposedly intelligent but very naive in other respects. Neither of which I warmed to. There were also similar male leads – alpha males, rich, expecting to get things their way. A popular trait at the moment seems to be books that centralise pretty exclusively on a husband and wife which this one did(and yep you guessed - Gone Girl, The Silent Wife and Before I go to Sleep also did). As well as those similarities I also thought there was echos of Kiss Me First where internet/technology was key – Hannah would possibly never have found about Nick if it weren’t for the internet. I find this happens with books. One book on a seemingly new concept is written, The Da Vinci code for example and then a surge of siml...

Book a day today is 'should have sold more copies' I have no idea how many copies the following books have sold. I’m sure in at least some cases they have sold millions and have been read by many more. However I think everyone should have awareness of the horrors that happened not so long ago and the individual acts of bravery that accompanied them. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose, Schindlers List/Ark by Thomas Keneally. There are many more I could list. They are based on trues stories, based on real people and if you stop to think about it, it’s mind blowing what they went through, suffered, sacrificed.

Book a day today is ‘Never Finished it’. Now you all know me. There’s not a one yet I haven’t finished. So I suppose I will have to nominate the one I am reading at the moment as technically I haven’t finished it yet. But I will! Current Book – Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt.