Karen will also be discussing her play ‘The Godess of Liberty’ which will be running in the Civic Theatre from Tuesday 21st to Saturday 25th Feb 2012.

The Last Weekend

&

The Absolutist

   3/10

Tallaght Library Bookclub
 
Date: 4th October 2011
 
6:45pm start, 7:45pm end
 
We had 12 at our bookclub this month, the book for discussion was The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
 
The main character is Rose Edelstein, a young girl who discovers at the age of 9 that when she eats food prepared by other people she can feel their emotions through the food. It begins with a lemon chocolate birthday cake her mother has made for her birthday which tastes of her mother’s deep despair. Her “special skill” becomes more pronounced as time goes on so that she can taste the origin of ingredients too and tell how the food was grown or raised. The novel follows Rose into adulthood and examines her relationships with those around her including her brother who becomes more withdrawn from the world as time goes on.
 
Opinions on this book were quite uniform and mainly negative. One positive was that the book was an easy read but for some the lack of quotation marks became irritating after a while.The intial concept sounded interesting and most had high expectations for it but the plot quickly became ridiculous especially where Joe, Roses’s brother was concerned. A common complaint was that a number of subplots and characters were introduced but never went anywhere. For instance the maternal grandmother regularly sent “gifts” to the family in the post of unwanted junk and she had a poor relationship with Rose’s mother but this relationship was never explained. The family was very disjointed and uncommunicative and the story wasn’t at all uplifting. The only character who was appealing was Joe’s childhood friend George but his appeal might have been that he was “normal” compared to Rose’s family.
 
The concept was good and should have made a good novel but the plot and execution weren’t very good. A few people remarked on the fact the title and artwork on the cover were very good and would make you want to read the book. A bookclub score of 3/10 was awarded for this book. The website www.goodreads.com was recommended as a good one for ordinary readers’ reviews of books

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

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)

He beat off competition from such prestigious writers as John Le Carre and Anne Tyler to receive the prize at Sydney’s Writers’ Festival recently.

Philip Roth is an American and the author of such acclaimed novels as “American Pastoral” and the “Human Stain”.