What book?

How do you choose a book from millions? You can’t  rely on covers. These days, even serious history is dressed in chic lit covers; it sells. So you think you are buying something crappy and easy and your book has been ‘marketed’ into making you buy something worthwhile. And the more frequent corollary: you are buying something worthwhile but it turns out to be crap. It’s terrible.

I have a fairly broad spectrum which includes any book with two important exceptions: fake writing or boring writing. By fake I mean comparisons that are not real and expressions that are dishonest. Fake has nothing to do with fantasy. And by boring I mean, something that is unendurable. I’ll be interested to find out where every body else’s cut off point is.

The only thing I had clear about the first book, is that I shouldn’t choose it. This is an anti-club remember. Ellie suggested following the guardian book club list, complete with questions and things. So that’s some homework to check out for this week.  How do book clubs the world over go about things?

The type of books read defines the club. So everyone in it needs to get a shot at choosing.

The first choice is based on nothing more glorious than there happen to be four copies handy: The Book of Illusions. And a couple of us have already read it and liked it. So far I read one sentence. It reads well.

The second choice will be more interesting because it will be the result, I hope of some discussion and hopefully debate.

Club phobia

In my first year of uni I joined every club going. By my second year of uni, and at the tender age of twenty, I had already come to the conclusion that clubs, societies, organizations and general membership of anything was not for me. Petty inclusions and exclusions, secrets and dynamics, I found it all pretty tiresome. I had two exceptions: family and work. You are more or less obliged to is  a member of your own family and where you work. After that, your friends can be on yours and their terms.  This is one of the reasons for my initial resistance to anything called a ‘club’, even if it was preceded by the word ‘book’.

Anyway a whole life has gone by and it’s time to face the phobia. Maybe it would be better to call it the book anti-club. Requisites to membership: book loving, inveterate reading.

Alice

Glass Alice book club

‘Book club’ always has had a negative association for me: Tedious activity at which people were too polite to say how bored they were really feeling. But last trip home to Ireland everybody I met was talking about them. So I decided to get a better take and find out more. And I discovered that I was wrong about book clubs. I am an ideal nerd for a book club. It sounds like a good way to do my favourite things: reading and talking about books, with some of my favourite people. So I came back inspired to start one. In this blog, I am going to talk about the adventure from the beginning, to as long as it goes on.