I liked this book. Ms Foreman combines an easy reading style with scholarly research. If you are at all interested in 18th Century History, Social History, Political History, then you should definitely read this book.
Category Archives: Serious
The Mathematics of Love – Emma Darwin
I read this book for book club. It was my choice (unfortunately). I found this book really confusing – the backwards and forwards movement in time got me every time. I know the sections were separated with a squiggle, but I kept missing it.
I didn’t feel any sympathy for any of the characters – except maybe Lucy. It felt like a creative writing assignment where so many boxes have to be ticked. The best part were the descriptions of the battles, like Waterloo.
And Cecil was he moving backwards and forwards in time some how?
Filed under Serious
The Secret of Lost Things – Sheirdan Hay
I enjoyed this book (so did everyone at book club). This is the stuff on the back …
 At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she’s read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home.
The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff –  a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel. There’s Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men. The store manager Walter Geist is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter’s eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to ‘place’ a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville’s personal correspondence but never published, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point, and sets Rosemary on her own journal of self-discovery.
This novel seemed to be a yearning for impossible things – Lillian wanting to find her son, Rosemary wanting Oscar, Walter wanting Rosemary, all the bookshop patrons wanting undiscovered first editions etc.
It was also a bit of quest novel with Rosemary in the position of the knight and the relationship with Oscar as the holy grail. Ultimately, of course, she finds a bit of inner knowledge.
This book is definitely worth a read.
Filed under Recommended, Serious
‘The Sea’ John Banville
I’m not really sure why I bought this book. I was in the book store buying my 2 year old a Maisy book (as you do) and saw that it was discounted plus it had a big sticker stating that it won the 2005 Man Booker prize. As I’m always looking for something ‘literary’ and intelligent for book club, I decided to grab a copy. Yes I do buy things based on the cover!
Max Morden’s (our hero) wife dies before the action starts. He returns to the village where he spent some childhood summers to grieve, but also to dwell on the enigmatic Graces whom he met one summer. The mute Myles and the precocious Chloe.
The story develops in a series of flash backs to that summer, memories of his wife and present events. We learn that Max is a drinker, troubled by something that occurred in that distant summer even that he changed his name to Max.
I find when I read a book something in my mind shifts – I understand something better, or I feel that I’ve had a conversation with a kindred spirit. Not this book. I feel nothing. I didn’t hate it or love it. I found it hard going and forced myself to finish it. The use of obscure words (i.e. cinereal, caduceus) fascinated and then frustrated me.  I avoided reading it because I couldn’t be bothered looking up another word in my dictionary.
It’s not a book I will reread and I will think carefully before recommending it to anyone.
Filed under Serious, Uncategorized