Garp lacked plot but was (generally) a Bookworm hit

We enjoyed a lively debate about The World According to Garp on Sunday. The beginning of the story involving 'feminist' Jenny Fields was hailed with enthusiasm but there was unanimous agreement that it petered out a little towards the middle. Mary struggled to wade through the trivialities and domesticity that was so prevalent on the characters' return from Vienna which Sarah supported, saying she experienced difficulty in picking the book up during this section but added that you were rewarded if you persevered through the minutiae to the accident, where the story gathered pace and ricocheted right through to the end. We loved the characters, the locations, the books within the book - Chris wondered if John Irving had perhaps used a couple of stories that were unfinished and wrapped the novel around those.

Generally, a hit - perhaps we could start rating our books out of 10 at each meeting?

Members came up with some fantastic suggestions for future reads: Mary suggested Three Men in a Boat or Three Men on a Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. Jo suggested The Small Hand (a thriller) by Susan Hill, Jackie suggested A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor and Chris suggested Mirror to Damascus by Colin Thubron, both travel books. With these great suggestions, we have decided to create the NBU book list as follows:

Next read (July) Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
August - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
September - A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (our travel book)
October - The Small Hand by Susan Hill (a chiller)
November - Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (to relieve those fast approaching winter nights)

And so to our next read:

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009, The Slap is an international bestseller. At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly 3-year-old boy. The boy is not his son. It is a single act of violence, but this one slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it happen. In his controversial, award-winning novel, Christos Tsiolkas presents an apparently harmless domestic incident as seen from eight very different perspectives. The result is an unflinching interrogation of our lives today; of the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century, a deeply thought-provoking novel about boundaries and their limits...

Enjoy - see you all again on 31st July!