The first meeting!

Well I think it's fair to say the first meeting of the book club was a great success!


Admittedly perhaps we didn't all quite gain the insight into the novel that we originally intended, due perhaps to logistics and timing issues.   A lesson for future book club events to to try and stick to books that are recently in print or else out of copyright and available on the internet, as there were difficulties in sourcing the book in time for the meeting.

While our opinion on the book maybe have been succinctly summed up by describing the books as "self-indulgent wank", we still managed to have a stimulating discussion and all gained a lot from the experience.....especially around our waistlines!

Much credit is due to Sharon who obviously prepared to feed the five thousand! We were treated to a delicious banquet, with supplementary courses courtesy of Rory to appease the carnivores amongst us!  Between the feast and the free-flowing wine everybody indulged themselves.

So back to the book:

For those of us who didn't manage to read the book wikipedia provided a neat little summary, and so they were able to join in our discussions.

Although the title suggested that the book was made up of ten and a half chapters, it could more accurately be described as ten short stories, with a brief discussion on the nature of love and the difficulty writing about love poses for the prose author compared to the poet inserted after the eighth story.

We agreed that the structure of the book was its chief downfall.  To some of the readers it appeared as though, inspired by Joyce, Barnes sought to prove to the reader that he too could experiment with style and technique over the course of the novel.  However unlike Ulysses the lack of a protagonist, and only incidental allusions to recurrent themes, such as the ark or woodworm, meant the reader had very little to tie the different stories together. 

In fact as the stories got darker as the book progressed, moving from whimsical takes on the Flood at the start from the perspective of a woodworm stowaway to eventually covering themes such as descents into madness and nuclear fallout some readers found it difficult to motivate themselves to continue reading without having a central protagonist to keep their attention drawn.  It became a case of reading for the sake of reading rather than for the enjoyment of the experience.  And this, dear readers, is not what our book club is about.

The verdict - we give 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters' four out of ten.