Friday 29 July 2016

July 2016 - England and Other Stories - Graham Swift

Sample of comments about this book:
-This book put me off reading. 

-Didn’t like the tenor of the stories – some were so negative.

-Would never read him again.

-Didn’t encourage her, nothing there that made her want to read another of his.

-Finished it and congratulated herself, but nothing stayed with her.

-Didn’t know what he was getting at.

-Didn’t see the point of them, very few had an outcome. Like vignettes.

-Not the sort of thing you want to read.

-Almost as if he was writing down ideas for stories.

- A couple of the later stories were quite interesting, but it was a lot of work to get there. 

3 of the six of us didn’t finish the book.

A couple of people thought that some of the stories were well written, but someone thought that it was poorly written.  Maggie wrote “I'm ploughing my way through the short stories but have yet to get to one which is in any way uplifting but in fairness I'm less than halfway through! I can appreciate, however, the skill in encapsulating a tale and painting believable pen portraits of the characters in just a few pages.”

He is supposed to be quite well thought of as an author. It was suggested that we try “Last Orders”, but I don’t think that we will be searching the shelves for the book.

A comment about the marks “5 for effort, but I don’t know whose”

Marks – 0  5 5 4 4   à 3 ½





No comments:

Post a Comment