Loving and hating books

A book our reading group unanimously loved, and a book our reading group (almost) unanimously hated:

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo

Literary reputations versus actual books

A radical disagreement in our reading group about the political stance of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, raising the question of how far books can suffer from their authors' meta-literary reputations. See our discussion here.

Can literary authors write good thrillers?

I hate it when people say they can't, but Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley seems to prove the point. Read our reading group discussion here.

Perspectives for reading

Our reading group recently read A Farewell to Arms, and found a difficulty in knowing what perspective through which to read a book which seemed very much of its time. Discussion here.

Latest reading group discussions

Here are our latest discussions:

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, which we found striking but slightly problematic, and
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, the prose of which we all admired for its elegance and economy, though we differed in our responses to the book's moderation of tone.

Two reading group discussions

Here's our latest book group discussion, of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, a novel which impressed and horrified our group in equal measure.

And here's our pre-Christmas discussion which I seem to have previously omitted, the very sixties The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which hadn't really stood the test of time for most of our group and failed to engage.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Realism and surreality

Latest discussion of our reading group: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, the form of which cleverly depicts the lack of realism in the capitalist mentality.

Three reading group discussions

Writing, and the publication of Used to Be, have kept me away from blogging recently, including the writing up of our reading group discussions, but here are the last three discussions which, post book launch, I've managed to write up over the last weekend:

The Bridge by Ian Banks

Christie Malry's Own Double Entry by B S Johnson

The Quiet Soldier: Phuong's Story by Creina Mansfield

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Do we read a novel for its issues, or its treatment of issues?

Our two most recent reading group discussions, in each of which the book tended to prompt discussion of the issues on which it centred, rather than itself as a literary artefact:

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason

Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

It's all to do with how we like to see ourselves

Excellent Guardian article by Sarah Churchwell on Go Set a Watchman, newly published and marketed as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, but which was in fact Harper Lee's earlier attempt at the same book, which an editor advised her to rewrite by concentrating on protagonist Scout's perspective as a child. Churchwell considers and judges various responses to the revelation in GSaW that the anti-racist Atticus of TKaM, Scout's lawyer father, turns out to have been racist after all, and makes the politically and culturally important points that the values of the Atticus of TKaM 'are in fact rather more dubious than the book, or many of its readers, care to admit' and that this new publication highlights the fact that TKaM is a 'consoling, childish, whitewashed fable' - views of TKAM which our reading group ultimately came to when we read it. (You can read our discussion, in which we decided that TKaM was very much how America likes to see itself, rather than a representation of reality, here.) 

Short sharp satire

Our reading group discussion of Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood satire, The Loved One.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

The Life of the Mind

Our reading group discussion of John William's once-neglected but revived and recently bestselling novel, Stoner.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading a novel through history

Our reading group discussion of the best-selling novel Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood, in which we ponder whether the fame of a real-life story can get in the way of its novelistic depiction.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Two more reading group discussions

The latest in our reading group discussions, in one of which we pondered the effect of time on our perception of books, and in the other were too dazzled by a current Folio-Prize shortlistee to think of such a thing.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

A question of culture?

We wondered if we were suffering cultural blindness when we read Turbulence by Chico Buarque in our reading group.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Unanimous praise for this book in our reading group, and a pondering on the fact that it hasn't been more popular.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Two reading group discussions

Here are the reports of our last two reading group discussions (with injections of my own subsequent thoughts on the second):

Ironweed by William Kennedy

and

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Science fiction or psychology?

Our book group reads Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

It depends what you know about a book before you read it

Our reading group discussion of Bainbridge's Harriet Said, her first-written novel but not her first published. An interesting case, we found, of the difference that being told the background to a novel makes to one's experience of reading it, which has implications for the power of blurbs and publicity.

It's what you expect and how you read

Here's our reading group discussion of Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates. It's perhaps an interesting insight into the difficulties of innovative fiction. It's a book based on hindsight rather than 'what-happens-next' plot (what happens is given from the outset), with a resulting non-linear structure and an innovative prose style. Opinions in our group were strongly divided, with most people finding the book stunning, but others left cold and unengaged and one even seriously irritated. Most strikingly and interestingly, the two camps had wildly differing impressions of the pace of the book, with those who were positive (and accepting of the premise) finding it urgent and emotionally involving, while those who were negative (and who I suspect preferred to read for plot) found it insufficiently urgent, static and repetitive.