Kathy offered to drive yesterday to the meeting...always interesting to talk to her. The group was discussing "All the Light You Cannot See". Everyone loved it (unusual to get that much consensus in a bookclub) except for one person who had only read some of it...well, somehow that doesn't quite count. There were probably around 60 people for the discussion. It's very well run and no one dominates. Perhaps a little surprising because probably half of the group are retired teachers:)
Most people belong to other bookclubs and almost every bookclub has discussed it or is going to discuss it.
The next selection is "The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. Kathy is moderating that one and I'll be sorry to miss it. I have the book from the library and it looks like a fun read. I may take a break from "Purity" which I am currently reading and enjoying but it's not exactly a light read.
This from a review:
“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry” is about a middle-aged man who owns a failing independent bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Depressed for the past two years following the death of his wife, Fikry is lonesome, angry and a bit of a literary snob. He doesn’t just stock any old book in Island Books, where “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.” Only those titles that satisfy his old-fashioned tastes are allowed in:
“I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”
