Book Club

My partner belongs to a bookclub and I go along for dinner before the meeting, and to give my partner a lift home. Of late, I have started to sit near the group when it meets and listen in. These are a few of the comments from last Tuesday’s meeting when they were discussing a book whose title and author are probably best kept out of this particular report (not that the bookclub would not not want this reported back to the author!) “He was so far up himself even I wanted to kill him . . . If it doesn’t stand alone then it’s no good as far as I’m concerned . . . I couldn’t get the image out of my head of Mr Burns and Smithers . . . It set the scene a little bit … there was no development of anything . . . I was really annoyed about the synopsis of it – on the front, “an extraordinary work”– this was all very misleading . . . How could you compare this man with Dickens and Hitchcock . . . Even though you don’t like him, there’s no reason why . . . The highlight of the whole book was finding a typo in the last seven pages . . . Very disappointing . . . I gave it a 3 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . it was crap but I didn’t mind reading it . . . 5 . . . I kept hoping it would get better . . . It was like Spotless, but much worse.” And then, having talked about the book for this month, the club turned its attention to other books the members may have written. One mentioned was “Heart-Shaped Box”, by Stephen King’s son, writing under the name of Joe Hill. Unlike this month’s book, it came highly recommended.