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Originally Posted by CRussel
I like this one! Though I'm OK with us leaving the title alone, but adding a paragraph into the first post. IAC, as folks can see, I'm going to keep talking about what I'm reading when I think it's of general interest, and I really encourage others to join in. Let's talk about books! And not just the ones we actually select for everyone to read. For me, this new theme approach has done such a good job of driving discovery I want to extend that here. In both directions. I hope my posts will lead to others discovering an interest in the books I'm finding, but I also hope to find even more from what you're reading. So join in!
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Charlie, I like this idea of sharing our book interests. The theme approach has been driving new discovery for me too. It's adding freshness and excitement to my reading addiction. I hope this post matches your vision of community conversation.
I recently read
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. It was announced in January as the 2017 Costa Book Novel Award winner. This book explores time in an interesting way. A teenage girl goes missing while on vacation in northern England's Peak District. The book is not a mystery thriller about the disappearance of the girl as you'd originally guess. Instead, it traces the affect of her disappearance on the daily lives of the villagers over a time period of 13 years. Each book chapter follows one year through the months and seasons and annual village events.
While searching for a nomination for this month's theme, I noticed that Jon McGregor wrote another book which has a unique approach to time.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize and was the winner of both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. I didn't nominate it because it seemed that the prose poem style would not have mass appeal, but I'm sure some of the club members may find it to their tastes. I've added it to my TBR.
From Goodreads:
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Risky in conception, hip and yet soulful, this is a prose poem of a novel -- intense, lyrical, and highly evocative -- with a mystery at its center, which keeps the reader in suspense until the final page. In a tour de force that could be described as Altmanesque, we are invited into the private lives of the residents of a quiet urban street in England over the course of a single day. In delicate, intricately observed closeup, we witness the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: the man with painfully scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house and who must now care for his young daughter alone; a group of young clubgoers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. The tranquillity of the street is shattered at day's end when a terrible accident occurs. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendering of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope. Rarely does a writer appear with so much music and poetry -- so much vision -- that he can make the world seem new.
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