Capital
Thanks to Simon for taking notes as I turned up far too late to do anything useful:
The first meeting of the year to be held out in the beer garden was a lively one. There was plenty of praise for Iain Banks, as well as for the BBC adaptation of The Crow Road (which can apparently be found on YouTube), although the book itself proved more divisive. For some, the book was full of heart and endearing characters, but others just wanted to shake Prentice into actually doing something! The aficionados recommended Espedair Street as a good choice for those interested in reading more of Banks’ work, but we’ll be exploring a different fictional road next meeting:
The next meeting will be on Thursday the 30th of May at Mango Landin, for which we’ll be reading Capital by John Lanchester.
The other nominations were:
Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Bliss by Peter Carey
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Not officially pitched but deserving of an honorary mention were Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (apparently so much better than The Marriage Plot) and Room by Emma Donoghue.
Also to repeat my note below, Clapham Book Group will also be discussing The Crow Road on May 22nd if you missed this or just fancy discussing it again – I’m hoping to get to that one early/sober enough to actually talk about the book!
I may pass ML on this day and poke my head in. Might check out this book in the library too; the Amazon excerpt looks very intriguing.