19/03/2015

Second meeting of bookhouse and at last I manage to blog about it.

Hello all. Welcome to our new members and welcome back to our old. The Beer and book club is back. We have a new name "Bookhouse" and a new venue "Beerhouse" There is a theme going on there.

At the first meeting we decided to read something translated into English. After a little deliberation we settled on "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch" by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Strangely enough, most of us including myself actually managed to complete the book and had quite a lot to say about it.

Very differing thoughts, ranging from darkly depressing and disturbing to strangely uplifting and entertaining. All in all the book was greatly enjoyed, achieving one of our highest ever average scores of 8/10.

We agreed on a free for all for the book for this month, The pitches were as follows:

• Tom Holt : Earth Air fire and Custard
• M John Harrison: Light
• Alice Herz-Sommer: A Garden of Eden in Hell
• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens
• Terry Pratchett: The Colour of Magic

The winning pitch came from Ivan, with Quite Ugly one Morning by Christopher Brookmyre.

More can be read about the book and the author here and here

The next meeting is set for 30th April when we will chat about this to the strains of some fabulous improvised music.

If you would like to pitch a book to the group for the following month we chose the genre of anything written by a winner of a nobel prize for literature. So a huge selection to choose from.

See you next month!

26/08/14 Meeting

The Gardener From Ochakov

Andrey Kurkov

Not too bad a turn out this month, I even managed to book the room this time. A very popular book. Even though most of us were fairly unsure what its all about we seem to have enjoyed it. Very easy read, likeable characters and a real page turner.

The scores ranged from 4.5 up to 8 with an average of 7, right up there with our highest rated books.

Mike raised a couple of interesting points.

We should move the goal posts slightly on how old a "modern" book should be, at the moment we say its anything up to 2 years, we should move this to 5. We all agreed that this makes sense so I think we should adopt this.
So...if you would like to pitch a book at the next meeting it should be anything more than 5 years old.

Also, we discussed the possibility of a portion of our time being dedicated to personal reviews of other books recently read, as a way to recommend books to others. This is a great idea. Well done Mike! Please feel free to compose a review for anything you think worthy of mention. I will compile reviews on here so no one misses a good book. Verbal reviews are great, but if you could scribble something down on paper or email that would be great!


The pitches for this months books were as follows:

• Jon - 131 by Julian Cope
• Ivan - The Children Act by Ian McEwan
• Val - Poppy Day by Amanda Prowse
• Peter - The Quarry by Iain Banks

The voting had to go to a second round after a draw between Peter and Val. 

Nail biting stuff.

The eventual victor was Peter, with our second Iain Banks Novel

I searched around for reviews of this book, I found this on the Guardian website which pretty much says it all, so I have copied it in its entirety.(contains swears)

The Quarry is a novel about disease, about "fucking cancer", as it's repeatedly described. It's a novel held up against the dying of the light, a fierce howl into the void that, in the image of the titular quarry, threatens to engulf the characters on every page. Reading this book, one is hit again and again with the fact – tragic and astonishing in equal measure – that Banks didn't know he was dying until he'd almost finished the first draft, that the cancer that was the subject matter of his novel would soon become the urgent subject matter of his life. It makes it a difficult, often distressing read. The Quarry performs in its fine prose those last, sad words of Christopher Hitchens: "I am not fighting or battling cancer, it is fighting me. My two assets were my pen and my voice."

1. The Quarry
2. by Iain Banks
3. 
   

I'd managed to reach my mid-30s without picking up one of Banks's books and so have had the melancholy pleasure of immersing myself in the sweep of his oeuvre these past few weeks, working my way through his mainstream novels and the speculative fictionthat he wrote under the Iain M Banks moniker (the M is for Menzies). Several of these, particularly, I thought, Use of Weapons, with its double-helix narrative structure and extraordinarily convincing alternative world, are nothing short of masterpieces. His loss is keenly felt. But this is a review, not an obituary, andThe Quarry leaves us with much to think about.

This is a very different novel from those upon which Banks's fame lies. It lacks the raw vigour of The Wasp Factory, the gothic shudder of The Crow Road. It lacks even the wintry romance of last year's Stonemouth. Instead, through the eyes of Kit, a hulking autistic teenager, we watch a man – Kit's father, Guy – die of cancer. There is barely a plot, little character development, the action almost all takes place in one location – Guy's crumbling home perched on the edge of a quarry. We have very few of the expected Banksian thrills; in their place, though, is a recognition of the power of fiction to fundamentally alter the reader's consciousness that owes much to Banks's alter ego as a writer of space operas. Rather than taking us to distant galaxies, though, this is a journey into the dark heart of a disease.

Kit's claustrophobic narrative is constrained in time and space: a long weekend at Willoughtree House, a final reunion of university flatmates to bid farewell to Guy. It's Peter's Friends meets Huis clos although instead of the Cambridge Footlights, these fortysomethings studied film at Bewford University (a fictionalised Durham). The friends themselves are sketched-in stereotypes – the politician, the stoner, the journalist, the soulless executives – and the half-hearted McGuffin that underlies the plot barely seems to matter by the end. Kit's voice is overfamiliar: the semi-savant autistic adolescent has become a well-worn literary device, allowing the author to lace the naivety of the child with the insight of the adult. What sustains the novel instead is Guy's mordant indignation at his illness and the way it opens up fissures in the once tight circle of friends.

Solzhenitsyn said of his Cancer Ward that "it is about cancer, cancer as such, not as it is written about in literature devised to entertain people, but as it is experienced every day by the sick". This seems to me what Banks is doing in The Quarry. The remorselessness of the disease is mirrored in the way Guy describes it, the way Banks forces us to witness the everyday indignities and depredations of the sufferer. While Guy's friends are left underdeveloped, cancer itself is a character in this novel and one that is painted with remarkable subtlety and skill. Guy's long speeches on the subject of his illness are bludgeoning, difficult to read even without the underlying hum of biographical contiguity. Through Guy, Banks picks apart the pabulums and platitudes that surround the disease. When Kit suggests some positive thinking, Guy responds in typically spiky (and foul-mouthed) form: "When the pain's bad and you look back on a life that you wish you'd known was going to be this short so you could have shaped it different, and look forward to just more pain and increasing disability and hopelessness, with the ever-enticing prospect of confusion and idiocy lying ahead, if and when the fucking cancer spreads into my brain. Oh yeah; lot to feel fucking positive about there!" There is no let up for the reader, just as there's no let up for Guy: we spend so much time with the disease that it becomes a relief to look up from the page.

The novel ends with an extended riff on a line from Nietzsche. Haze, the stoner, says: "When you stare into the void, it, like, stares back at you." The full quote he's paraphrasing begins: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." This, I think, is one of the messages underlying The Quarry: how to look into the abyss without being sucked into it, how to write about (and live with) the monstrous evil of cancer without descending to mere nihilism. This is a novel that's perched at the dangerous edge of things, looking down. It's an urgent novel and an important one and, finally, it's all just so desperately sad.

The next meeting is scheduled for 30th September. Usual place, Usual time.

See you there.

22/07/14 Meeting

Wild Ink

Richard Smyth

Another good turnout this month, meeting only slightly marred by the fact that some idiot forgot to book the room. Luckily the weather was still very warm so we sat outside.

The book didn't fare too well. The major observations being that it was very hard to empathise with any of the characters, and very little seemed to happen!

Scores ranged from 2.5 up to 5 with an average of 3.9. Our lowest score yet.

The pitches for this month were as follows

• Jon - I Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Helen - All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

 The winning pitch was from Ivan with The Gardener from Ochakov by Andrey Kurkov.

Here`s a synopsis from Goodreads:

Igor walks along in the old Soviet policeman's uniform, confident that he'll have the best costume at the party. But Igor hasn't gone far before he realises something is wrong. The streets are unusually dark and empty, and the only person to emerge from the shadows runs away from him in terror.


After a perplexing conversation with the terrified man, who turns out to be a wine smuggler, and on recovering from the resulting hangover, Igor comes to an unbelievable conclusion: he has found his way back to 1957. And it isn't the innocent era his mother and her friends have so sentimentally described.

Heres a bit of info about the author stolen from various places.

Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin. Kurkov has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the world’s media, notably in the UK, France, Germany and the States.

Kurkov's father was a test pilot and his mother was a doctor. He started writing at the age of seven when after the death of two of his three pet hamsters, he wrote a poem about the loneliness of the remaining pet. He also produced poetry about Lenin, purportedly inspired by his Soviet education at the time.

As a trained Japanese translator Kurkov was assigned military service assisting the KGB.However, he managed to get his papers changed to service with the military police. This offered him a greater degree of freedom during and after his service period. He was assigned a prison guard position in Odessa. It was during this period that Kurkov wrote all of his children's stories.

Kurkov's first novel was published two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the ensuing social and political turmoil he made the first steps towards self-publishing and distribution. Borrowing money from friends to fund his work he managed to publish independently.While organising distribution around Ukraine, he would also sell copies by hand from stalls on busy streets.

Like many successful writers, Kurkov had difficulty getting his first publishing contract. He reportedly received 500 rejections before being accepted, in which time he had written almost eight complete novels.

Later in his career he won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the post-Soviet era and featuring on European bestseller lists.

The next meeting will be on 26th of August.

See you there!

ps. If anyone would like me to order from Quinns please let me know asap

24/06/14 Meeting

The Enchanted April

Elizabeth von Arnim

Great turn out this month, and a very lively meeting.
Very mixed opinions on this months book.
Easy to read, well described characters, a happy, dreamy, magical book, full of flowers, sunshine and emotion....is one description I have stolen from amazon that seems to sum it up.


Scores ranged from 4 up to 8 with an average of 6.25, so very good.

The Pitches for this months book were as follows.

• Helen - Instructions for a heatwave by Maggie O`Farrell
• Jon - 131 By Julian Cope
• Val - The vanishing act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O`Farrell
• Ivan - I am Pilgrim by Terry Haye

The winning pitch was Marie with a book written by her friend Richard Smyth.

No pressure to impress us there then Marie!

The book is Wild Ink by Richard Smyth.

Heres a short synopsis from the publishers, Dead Ink

Wild Ink is a blackly comic story of friendship and envy, love and memory, booze and uproar, secrets and scandal. Albert Chaliapin is dead – or at least, he feels like he ought to be. He lives in a world occupied only by the ghosts of his former life (and his nurse, who can’t even get his name right). Then, one day, his past – in the form of a drunk cartoonist, a suicidal hack and a corrupt City banker – pays a visit, and Chaliapin is resurrected, whether he likes it or not. He doesn’t, much.

Someone’s sending him some very strange cartoons. Someone’s setting off bombs all over London. Someone’s been up to no good with some very important people. This is no job for a man wearing pyjamas. Will Chaliapin make it out alive? And is being alive, when it comes down to it, really all it’s cracked up to be?

And a link to the authors site here

I will call into Quinns tomorrow to make sure they can order this book and send out an email with the price and when it will be available, If you could let me know asap if you want a copy I will get them ordered.

The next meeting is scheduled for the 22nd of July at 20.00. 

29/04/14 Meeting

The Dice Man

Luke Rhinehart

Small turn out but a very lively meeting! We discussed the Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Very mixed opinions on this book I must say, ranging from "very dated and of its time" to "its stood the test of time very well!" Those of us who have completed the book were in agreement that it was far too long and lost its way at about 3/4 through. Ivan commented on the complete lack of an ending, the book seems to finish almost mid sentence. Reading through a lot of the Amazon reviews The general consensus does seem to be read 75% of it then go and read something else. 

The scores ranged from 0 to 7 with an average of 6

The pitches for this months book were as follows.

• Ivan - The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Helen - Longbourn by Jo Baker
• Jean - Life after life by Kate Atkinson 

The winning pitch was Mike's.. Lionheart by Sharon Penman

Here is an outline of the book from Bookpage.com

Sharon Kay Penman transcends beloved-author status: among lovers of historical fiction, she is cherished. Her latest offering sets out to capture the larger-than-life Richard I—crusader, king of England and member of the colorful Angevin family—and she does not disappoint.

The stage for Richard’s story is the Third Crusade, a quest to retake Jerusalem from the hands of the sultan of Egypt, Salah al-Din, called Saladin by the Westerners. As Richard embarks on this all-consuming quest in concert with the rest of Christendom, he rescues his sister, Joanna, from a precarious political position after the death of her husband and marries Berengaria, daughter of the king of Navarre. And so the two women join Richard in the Holy Land, bearing witness as the plot clambers over the highs and lows of history—scandalous political intrigue, battles won and lost and the thrills and heartaches of maintaining a life in the midst of war.

Richard’s profile in history is that of a bold, boisterous warrior-king, a character that seems almost too exaggerated to be real. Penman reaches beyond the hero, not to imbue him with flaws, but to find the man behind the legend. Penman’s Richard I is hot-blooded with incredible military prowess, but capable of being humbled and moved. His commitment to act with honor is not outsized, but real.

Richard’s spotlight, however, is very nearly stolen by his tough-minded sister and quiet, yet strong new wife, two women who become compelling characters in their own right in Penman’s hands.

Penman is often commended for writing about the medieval world without passing judgment on its characters and the value system that makes them so different from modern readers, and she does that again in Lionheart. She also succeeds at depicting the odd nature of holy war. Both Richard and Saladin, a shrewd commander famous for both might and mercy, believe they are serving God with each clash of swords, and yet each respects the other’s military skill and strategy.

The author is also known for her meticulous research; it’s as if she sees herself more as a historiographer than a novelist. Lionheart is no departure from this reputation, and the richly imagined dialogue and story are intercut with snippets from primary sources. The truth of the events makes the novel all the more fascinating and worthy of several reads.

A Bit of info about the author:

Biography

Sharon Kay Penman is the author of seven critically acclaimed historical novels: The Sunne in Splendour, Here be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, The Reckoning, When Christ and his Saints Slept, Time and Chance, and Devil’s Brood. She has also written four medieval mysteries. Her first was The Queen’s Man, the queen in question being Eleanor of Aquitaine, a finalist for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America. Her other mysteries are Cruel as the Grave, Dragon’s Lair, and Prince of Darkness. She lives in New Jersey.

Reviews for Sharon Kay Penman

"An historical novelist of the first rank."
--Publishers’ Weekly

‘Bloody and violent deaths, tearful betrayals by close relatives, dizzying shifts of power – Sharon Penman is particularly good at battles – the whole is very convincing."
--Times

"She manages to illuminate the alien shadowland of the Middle Ages and populate it with vital characters whose politics and passions are as vivid as our own."
--San Francisco Chronicle

Finally here is a link to her website.

If anyone would like me to order any copies via Quinns please let me know.

The next meeting will be Tuesday 27th May. If I get time this month I will be looking at other venues around Harborough. Any suggestions?

Jon.

01/04/14 Meeting

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared 

Jonas Jonasson

Not the best turn out but still a very enjoyable meeting. We welcomed a new member, Marie who I think enjoyed the evening! I have added her to the mailing list. Once again the room had been double booked so I think I will have a wander around and look for a change of venue, any suggestions most welcome as long as the beer is good and the music can be turned down, or even better off.

We discussed The 100 year old man.. which met with our usual mixed bag of opinions. Some criticisms of the slightly choppy style, maybe a result of the translation. the book was far too far fetched for some, we all admitted you could punch massive holes in the historical events, but agreed it didn't matter..

The scores ranged from 4 up to 8, with an average of 6.1.

The pitches for this months book were as follows.

• Helen - The Outsiders by S E Hinton
• Ivan - Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons

The winner was my pitch.."The Dice Man" by Luke Rhinehart

Heres a stolen outline and a couple of reviews:

In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God .... There was a man sent by Chance, whose name was Luke .... And Chance was made flesh ... and he dwelt among us, full of chaos, and falsehood and whim. -- from The Book of the DieSo begins this 1970s classic of sex, drugs, and, of course, dice. Bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart lives with his wife and two children in their "slightly upper, slightly east" apartment in Manhattan. Dissatisfied with both Western and Eastern philosophies, alternately embracing the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of life, Luke's world is forever changed when he finds religion through the simple roll of the die and is "stunned and converted -- as only the utterly bored can be".

Let the dice decide This is the only path to liberation and truth for Dr. Rhinehart and his patients. It seems sex is always an option as they roll their way through therapy sessions, relationships, parenting -- even a mental institution breakout. Luke spreads his new religion with a hilarious combination of evangelical fervor and moral depravity, turning his life -- and in some ways the world -- on its ear. Because once you hand your life over to the dice, anything can happen.

A rollicking good read and an irreverent parody of American psychoanalytical culture, The Dice Man is entertaining, humorous, shocking, and subversive -- one of the international cult bestsellers of our time.

"Luke Rhinehart and The Dice Man have launched a psychiatric revolution". -- The Sunday Telegraph (London)

"Witty...reckless...clever, a caper at the edge of nihilism". -- Life magazine

"Weird, hilarious...an outlandishly enjoyable book". -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

And here is a little information about the author stolen from Goodreads, with a link to his website.

Luke Rhinehart

Author profile

born

in The United States 

November 05, 1932

gender

male

website

http://www.lukerhinehart.net/

genre

Science Fiction & Fantasy

About this author

Luke Rhinehart is the pen name of the author George Cockcroft.

I have a feeling that there will be a lot of copies of this knocking around in the charity shops but if you would like me to ask Quinns to get this in please let me know asap.

The next meeting is set for the 29th, if there is to be a change of venue I will let you know by email.

See you there!

J

25/02/2014 Meeting

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami

Excellent turn out this month, with the added bonus of an amazing chocolate cake, supplied indirectly by Kim`s son. He really doesn't know what he missed!

Cake and ale and books.

We discussed Jeans choice of Norwegian wood. Very Mixed opinions, with scores ranging from 4 up to 8, an average of 5.8. A few who have started the book intend to finish it at some point, so no spoilers... The general consensus was a very well written if a little depressing book, not a page turner but well worth persevering with.

Now, as a little experiment I would like to try to embed a tweet into the blog, as I am hoping to get book reviews from people on twitter and facebook to help things along a little. 

@hippy_jon a great book, Murakami is an incredible writer. (Not a very wordy review, apologies).
— Stuart (@the_overfed) February 25, 2014

Well that seems to work.

These were the pitches for this months reading. 

• Me - And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
• Mike - The Redbreast by Joe Nesbo
• Mike - Dominion by C J Sansom
• Ivan - Harvest by Jim Crace
• Helen - The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris
• Kim - Recipe for life by Mary Berry

The winning pitch was Peter`s Daughter, who`s name inexcusably escapes me, with 

"The Hundred year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared" 

by

Jonas Jonasson.

Here is a rough outline stolen from Amazon:

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not...Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan's earlier life in which - remarkably - he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century. Already a huge bestseller across Europe, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun, feel-good book for all ages.

And a profile of the author stolen from Good Reads:

Jonas Jonasson

born

in Växjö, Sweden 

July 06, 1961

gender

male

website

http://www.jonasjonasson.com

About this author

After a long career as a journalist, media consultant and television producer, Jonas Jonasson decided to start a new life. He wrote a manuscript, he sold all his possessions in Sweden and moved to a small town by Lake Lugano in Switzerland, only a few meters from the Italian border.

The manuscript became a novel. The novel became a phenomenon in Sweden, and now it is about to reach the rest of the world.

Quinns reliably inform me that they will have stock of the book by the end of the week. If you mention Hippyjons Book club you will get 30% discount on the book too!.

Next meeting is scheduled for 1st April. Our official start time is now 20.00 but feel free to turn up when it suits you, as usual. If you would like to pitch a book its anything that would fit under the catch all of "classics"

See you there

Jon

PS:

If you are reading this via twitter or facebook and would like to submit a review or even just a score out of 10 then please feel free to get in touch!