September Meeting

Bullfighting is a collection of 13 short stories from the author Roddy Doyle which centre around middle aged men. In the first story “Recuperation,” a man sets off for a prescribed walk around his neighbourhood, the sights trigger memories and recollections of his wife, his children and his younger days. In “Animals,” George remembers caring for his children’s many pets, his efforts to spare them grief when they die or disappear, looking, in the eyes of his wife like a hero like “your man from ER.” But now his kids are reared and he’s unemployed, and he’s slowly getting used to that. Comments form the bookclub were that the stories were quite depressing and very similar in that they were all about men of a similar age who all seemed to be having some kind of a mid life crisis, they also lacked the usual humour present in Roddy Doyle’s books. The stories ended very abruptly and because they were all very similar they were difficult to distinguish from eachother and we had difficulty remembering individual ones. One story that did stand out however was “Blood” which was about a man who suddenly developed vampire-like tendencies and went to extraordinary lengths to satisfy his craving. The book received a poor 2/10 bookclub rating. The book to be discussed at the October meeting is “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” by Aimee Bender