2017- July - To Rise again at a decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

This book is the stream of consciousness flowing through the mind of a Manhattan dentist while someone is trying to steal his identity and he becomes involved in a fake religion.

They said:

….at its best it is enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged :with the mysteries of belief and disbelief, linguistically agile and wrong footing, and dismayingly funny in the way that only serious books can be.

The Guardian

…at once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force.

WWW goodreads

…wit so sharp, its fake-biblical texts so clever and its reach so big……a major achievement

New York Times

A serious inquiry into the condition of a human soul.

Financial Times

WE said:

The stream is heavily polluted

Why am I reading this?

Sordid

“Funny” - no way!

Do not appreciate the tenor of the discourse

A mind like a sewer and no wish to spend time in a sewer

Insulted by it

No redeeming features

Unmemorable ending

6 people started the book - only 2 people got all the way through. The rest gave up between page 33 and page 60.

There was general agreement that:

it did not deserve any mark at all: 0, zero, nothing, zilch, rien, nul points!

(There were mutters - was this choice “the Revenge of Liz”?)

PS Credit where it is due!

Sadly this singular novel is all mouth and not quite enough trousers. The Independent

2017-May - The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

These are my notes on the book, as there were only three at the meeting and nobody did notes.

An excellent Biography of Alexander Von Humboldt and his travels and explorations. A 10 by any scientific person's scoring. His researches and books stimulated so many people, and there are chapters on some of these, Charles Darwin, Thoreau, Marsh, who influenced Muir who found the national Parks movement to prevent man from destroying nature. That is his main theme. Wulf writes very well.

2017-June - Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

The novel tells the story of Eitan, an Israeli neuro-surgeon, who, exhausted after a 19 hour shift at the hospital, finds himself involved in a fatal SUV collision in which he hits an illegal immigrant from Eritrea. In that isolated moment in time, he makes a decision which proves to be life changing for him. He leaves the fatally wounded man to die at the roadside.

Unknown to him, the accident was witnessed by the Eritrean’s wife and she begins to extort Eitan for his medical skills and he is forced to surround himself with deception for the price for her silence. This sets the scene of the underlying theme of power throughout the narrative of the book and its misuse. It is a story of secrets based on the unspoken.

There is a tension to the story as it revolves around the emotionally charged triangle of Sirkit the widow, Eitan and his wife Liat, with the dramatic irony that Liat is the police officer investigating the hit and run incident. The book is threaded through with themes of guilt, shame and racial intolerance, with gestures towards wider political themes, including a sub-plot involving the Bedouin Arabs.

Opinions within the reading group were varied, as is reflected in the score but there was general agreement that the overuse of psychological analysis became tedious, making it a dense and slowly paced read. In addition, although the text raised many searing moral questions and dilemmas, the third narrative dampened the emotion and didn’t really evoke any real empathy towards any of the characters.

One of us, although not present, had read the book, reported it as not very memorable.

Score: 6.3