We know how everyone loves a good book list and so here is a list of all the books we have read in the group so far. We have gone with what the blurb said vs. what we thought. All scores out of ten are based on an average of the group’s individual scores.
Latest reads for … 2012
JANUARY
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
William and Molly lead a life of small pleasures, riddles at the kitchen table, and games of string and orange peels. All around them a city rages with war. When the uprising began, William’s wife was taken, leaving him alone with their young daughter. They keep their heads down and try to remain unnoticed as police patrol the streets, enforcing a curfew and arresting citizens. But when an old friend seeks William out, claiming to know what happened to his wife, William must risk everything. He ventures out after dark, and young Molly is left to play, reconstructing his dangerous voyage, his past, and their future. An astounding portrait of fierce love within a world of random violence, The Curfew is a mesmerizing feat of literary imagination.
This is a book by a young American writer that benefits from group discussion. We enjoyed the dreamlike prose and the universal truths scattered throughout the narrative. We found it a very quick but throught-provoking read and were impressed by the author’s ability to craft a story that feels timeless and rootless. Some of us thought it felt like translated fiction; we would be hard pressed to say it was American unless we knew the nationality of the writer beforehand. And while the narrative lulled us into a false sense of security, this is a book about violence, murder and unexplained “disappearances”. While we all generally loved the book, there were some who felt you had to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the cutting-edge, experimental nature of it.
The choice of: Armen
Group rating: 8
FEBRUARY
Meeting cancelled.
MARCH
Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways. Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made. But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go – and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip.
This Australian classic, first published in 1977, was universally disliked by the group. While we appreciated it as a “snapshot in time” and enjoyed Garner’s beautiful prose and her depiction of a destructive relationship, we were less enamoured of the dull storyline and the bed-hopping, drug-taking habits of the characters. We found the narrator self-indulgent, annoying and hypocritical. And we all wondered how on earth she was supporting herself, a child and a junkie boyfriend, not to mention the frequent road trips to NSW and Tasmania, when she didn’t appear to have a full-time job!
The choice of: Kim
Group rating: 4
APRIL
The White Shadow by Andrea Eames
Ti
nashe is a young Shona boy living in a small village in rural Rhodesia. The guerilla war of the late 1960s haunts the bushlands, but it only infrequently affects his quiet life; school, swimming in the river, playing with the other kids on the kopje. When his younger sister, Hazvinei, is born, Tinashe knows at once that there is something special about her. Their life in the village, once disturbed only by the occasional visits of his successful uncle and city cousin, Abel, now becomes entangled with the dual forces of the Shona spirit world and the political turmoil of the nation. As Tinashe, Hazvinei and Abel grow older, their destinies entangle in ways they never expected. Tinashe is prepared to follow his sister anywhere – but how far can he go to keep her safe when the forces threatening her are so much darker and more sinister than he suspected? Andrea Eames weaves together folklore and suspense in this compelling tale of a boy struggling to do the right thing in an unpredictable world.
This second novel by African-born author Andrea Eames was well liked by the group. While some pointed out the inconsistencies in characterisation and voice, we all enjoyed the evocative, fable-like nature of Eames’ prose and her ability to bring rural Africa to life in her descriptions of the heat, the dust and the poverty. We also loved the portrait of childhood she delivered and the way in which she managed to convey the difficulty of being a woman in this society without banging us over the head with gender politics. We were also fascinated by the folkore and magic that Eames weaves into the storyline, even though we were slightly puzzled by the ending. The group would also have liked to have known more about the political situation which was only mentioned in passing.
The choice of: this book was offered to us by the publisher Harvill Secker.
Group rating: 7
Sounds like a lovely group to be in – up in Scotland so a bit far to come for a book group. I’d have brought Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s Sunset Song – for so long my favourite book and I’d have sneaked in Arthur Phillips’s The Song is You because it stole my heart last summer.
[...] N.B. This was a Riverside Reader’s book group read. I think it’s worth mentioning that this book divided us on ratings. Definitely a ‘Marmite’ book. You can see a summary of the group’s thoughts here. [...]