Book Club Blog

*Sniff* I am so upset!!!

I have finished this book! It was so so so good!!! I couldn't believe I was enjoying a book this much... I read it standing on the platform waiting for the train/tube... I read it standing on the tube cos there was no room to sit... I read it on the escalator out of the tube station... I read it everywhere!!

It was so interesting and it educated me A LOT. I have heard about the Biafra War but I never really knew the details... This book educated me while it told different stories... of people linked to each other. How the war affected them, what they experienced, what they witnessed, I felt like I was there.

If you haven't read it, please get it and read it :-)

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie - Done
26a by Diana Evans - Currently Reading
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie - Next in Line

Purple Hibiscus Review
The first page of the book got on my nerves... I am so used to reading books by British, Irish and American authors... My first impression was that she was writing the book like she was talking... Does that make sense... It took me a day to get into the book, I had to change my mindset and it was not easy.

Once, I got into the book, it was an interesting read. It's about a rich Nigerian family, a religious father who is abusive, Kambili, the main character is so timid and her classmates think she is a snob, they don't understand that she has a STRICT father who will beat the HELL out of her if she doesn't come first in school or if she gets home a couple of minutes late... A father who has practically disowned his father because he is not Catholic... A father who has beaten his wife so bad, she has miscarried more than once...

Kambili and her brother stay at her Aunt's for a while and things start to get interesting...

I gotta go now, I might write a little more about the book...

Read it, if you can.

I was so excited when I started reading 'White Teeth;, I was so sure it was gonna be a good book. I have not liked it so far... It just isn't working for me. I tried really hard to read it but I found myself staring into space after reading a few lines. So.... I have put it aside for a few weeks and hope to come back to it in a different mood and HOPEFULLY enjoy it!


My friend brought back Purple Hibiscus, among other Nigerian books for me... I just started reading this. I am on page 71. It is not bad at all... I just want to understand why she called Pounded Yam, 'FUFU'. LOL!!!

I will write my review when I am done with it.

Over the course of my twelve-year reading career, I've come across the defining principle of many novels -- good triumphs over evil. In romantic novels, the rebellious guy wins the heart of the fair maiden, in crime thrillers the criminal is found and duly punished, and in spy thrillers the moles get a bullet in the head. Of course, this is hardly realistic -- bad stuff happens and it seems the bad triumphs over evil in many cases.

You can imagine from my rants that I prefer people who write as realistically as possible. I'll be introducing Stephen Hunter, someone I've come to admire (even though I've read just two of his books). They always have a bitter-sweet ending -- if you prefer 'and they happily lived ever after' books, then this guy isn't for you.

The Second Saladin

Paul Chardy, a CIA agent trained freedom fighters among the Kurds in Iraq, befriending their leader Ulu Beg as he helps in the fight for the Kurds to gain their freedom. Someone in the CIA betrays Chardy, and he falls into the hands of the Soviets. Somehow, someway, Ulu Beg believes Chardy to have betrayed their cause -- especially when his son gets killed.

Ten years later, Chardy has left the service, and the CIA recieves an alert -- Ulu Beg has crossed into the United States through Mexico. His mission is to assassinate a leading American political figure.

Against his wishes, Chardy finds himself pulled in to track his friend. As his trainer, he is the only one who can read Beg. The CIA wants him killed -- Chardy wants to save him. Between them is a woman who has known, fought with and loved both of them -- Chardy as a lover, Beg as a friend. What ensues is something you wouldn't find in your wildest dreams.

The Spanish Gambit (also called Tapestry of Spies)

Robert Florry was once a police officer in India during the British occupation. While carrying out his duties, he caused an innocent man to be hanged. His past comes back to haunt him when the British Secret Service use the leverage to recruit him to track down Julian Raines, a British poet and radical who was once his friend.

With suspected ties of working for the KGB [apparently, there was some speculation he was recruited by the Bolsheviks during his student days at Eton where he and Florry studied], Raines is one of the last people Florry would investigate. Even though they're no longer friends, Florry still has his reservations about Raines being a KGB spy.

You'll need to be a bit familiar with the Spanish Civil War and the opinions of the British political left. Again, you'll be left with a sour ending.

Let me know if you come across any Stephen Hunter books -- I've read just these two.

If you were told an 18-year-old son of a preacher teamed up with a Jewish girl during World War II to repair and fly an old, wrecked plane from Denmark to England, you might be inclined to disbelief. If the teller of the story is Ken Follett, however, you'll encounter a story by him at his very best -- writing World War II thrillers.

Unlike most other books dealing with Nazis and the second world war, this doesn't cast them in the eternal dishonourable fellows committing abominable acts. The focus is more on the inter-family rivalry, which gets Harald Olufsen (our hero) expelled from school and his brother killed, all at the instigation of Peter Flemming, a police officer.

One thing I loved about this book is the complexity of the characters -- no one is completely good, and none is completely bad, and we can sometimes sympathise with Flemming (the villain) when you consider he feels a sesne of duty to act the way he does (although he's quite overzealous).

What makes the book really engrossing is the tension between Harald and his love interest (Karen) who makes the flight with him, and Follett doesn't get too sexually explicit (if you've read Jackdaws and Lie Down with Lions).

There's nothing more to say, except that this is a good read.

When I FINALLY got into the book, I really enjoyed it.

The book begins with:

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974"

My Review: This book is a saga. It tells the story of the main character's grandparents (brother and sister married each other!), parents (cousins married each other). Apparently, in-breeding is the main reason for the resulting Haemaphrodite, Callie.

The first 200 (and more) tell the story of her grandparents and parents... I didn't really find that interesting, I struggled through it.

Can you imagine living the first 13 years of life thinking you are a girl? Only to find out you are BOTH but more a BOY than a GIRL?

Born as Callie, the doctor who delivered her was OLD and distracted so he did not notice anything... Callie lived a normal young girl's life until PUBERTY. No period, No breasts, Broad shoulders, Lean hips... While all the girls in her year were growing breast, showing off about their periods.

Her parents had NO idea she was a haemaphrodite... her Mother starts to worry that she is not going through puberty as expected so Callie lies to her that she'd started her period, she also starts stuffing her bra. Callie was attracted to girls and she had a 'relationship' with 'The Object', a pretty girl in her school. She did try to have sex once with 'The Object's' brother and it hurt LIKE HELL so she stopped the penetration.

She knew she was different but successfully hid this until she was involved in an accident and it was during examination in the Emergency Room that the medical staff realised her 'Secret'... Her parents had some doctors see her and she was referred to a specialist doctor in New York. She went through some psychological evaluations and tests and found out(by reading the Doc's note without her parent's or doc's knowledge) that although she was raised as a girl - she had more of the male gene.

I think her life after the actual discovery was rushed because as I was getting more and more into the book, IT ENDED!!!

I will give this book 5/10 for the first 200 pages and 8/10 for the rest of the book.

On to my Next Book - White Teeth by Zadie Smith. This book BETTER be good or else someone's gonna pay! HaHa!!!

When you are reading a book, and you know it's interesting but it's still hard to read?!?!?

This book I am reading has a very good storyline but the author overwrites! I am struggling with this book and I have been so tempted MANY times to drop it and move on...

BUT I WILL NOT!!!

UPDATE (Sunday 15th October): The Book has really picked Up!!! I would recommend it to anyone if you just skip the first 200 pages... LOL!!! Almost Done!

Vera put up a post about a couple of his books HERE.

I have read a couple of his books and so far... what I have read, I have liked.

Have any of you read his books? If so, which of his books are your favourites?

If you're like me, you probably dump a book as soon as you see it's by a lady, simply because they tend to focus more on emotions -- and rarely do they write as well as their male counterparts when doing so in predominantly men-only genres.

Exceptions do exist however -- Patricia Cornwell, Linda Fairstein, and as I discovered this week, P.D. James do tend to hold their own.

I picked up Devices and Desires two days ago at my school library and found it very hard to put down -- from the first page till the last, Miss James kept me guessing, and the funny thing was that I guessed wrong all the way.

The book features her cult favorite Adam Dalgliesh unwittingly involved in a serial killer case -- the man who is called The Whistler.

From Publishers Weekly:

James ( A Taste for Death ) sets her 11th novel on Larksoken, a remote windswept headland in Norfolk, where the presence of a huge nuclear energy plant serves as a metaphor for the power of the past to rule over her characters. Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, in Larsoken to settle an estate left him at the death of a relative, is drawn into the investigation of a serial killer, the Whistler.

Dalgliesh's neighbors include the power station's director, Alex Mair; his elegant sister Alice, a cookbook author; acting administrator--and Alex's former lover -- Hilary Robarts; and anti-nuclear activist Neil Pascoe. The next signature killing , of the widely disliked Robarts, turns out to have occurred hours after a young man who firmly establishes his identity as the Whistler commits suicide.

The question of who murdered Robarts, then, centers around motive. This intricate, layered mystery may be read as parable: we can escape the consequences of our choices, political and personal, no more than we can shed our private histories. This is dark James, plotted with a slight unevenness but utterly faithful to her deeply and sympathetically plumbed characters.

I went to a Cancer Research Charity Shop in search of a book that would wow me after the long long Good Book drought I have experienced.

There were so many books, I didn't know what to pick so I asked a lady for her recommendations...


Amazon.co.uk Review
Anita Shreve now offers a skilfully crafted exploration of the long reach of tragedy in The Pilot's Wife. News of Jack Lyons's fatal crash sends his wife into shock and emotional numbness:
Kathryn wished she could manage a coma. Instead, it seemed that quite the opposite had happened: She felt herself to be inside of a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others ... frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers and curious onlookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form.
The situation becomes even more dire when the plane's black box is recovered, pinning responsibility for the crash on Jack. In an attempt to clear his name, Kathryn searches for any and all clues to the hours before the flight. Yet each discovery forces her to realise that she didn't know her husband of 16 years at all. Shreve's complex and highly convincing treatment of Kathryn's dilemma, coupled with intriguing minor characters and an expertly paced plot, makes The Pilot's Wife really take off. --James Barry (Amazon.co.uk)


Amazon.co.uk Review
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is an ambitious novel. Genetics, eugenics, gender, race, class and history are the book's themes but Zadie Smith is gifted with the wit and inventiveness to make these weighty ideas seem effortlessly light.
The story travels through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India but ends up in a scrubby North London borough, home of the book's two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal. They met in the Second World War, as part of a "Buggered Battalion" and have been best friends ever since. Archie marries beautiful, buck-toothed Clara, who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother, and they have a daughter, Irie. Samad marries stroppy Alsana and they have twin sons: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided and entirely familiar; reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. A simple scene, Alsana and Clara chatting about their pregnancies in the park: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's ... parts."
Samad's rant about his sons--"They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave--acutely displays "the immigrant fears--dissolution, disappearance" but it also gets to the very heart of Samad.
White Teeth is a joy to read. It teems with life and exuberence and has enough cleverness and irreverent seriousness to give it bite. --Eithne Farry


Amazon.com Review
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons

I just started reading Middlesex and I am hoping and praying I enjoy it cos I am tired of 'blah' books. I spent £6.50 on three books, bargain innit? Although some charity shops sell their books for 50p each!!!

I will write a mini- review on each book when I am done.

I was kind of sceptical about this book because my friend who recommended it described it as ‘the best book I have read in a long time’. Now, when a book comes with such high praise, it is almost always doomed to underwhelm.

Surprisingly, it surpassed her recommendation. ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ is the story of Anna and Kate. Kate was diagnosed with Leukaemia when she was very young. Because of her age and the severity of her illness, doctors believe that a non-familial donor match has a high chance of being rejected by Kate’s body and not working. Her parents make the decision to have a third child and through genetic technology, ensure that she is a complete donor match for Kate. This is how Anna is born; essentially her purpose in life is as a donor body for Kate. All her life Anna undergoes operations to donate bone marrow (and other things which I can’t remember) to her sister and the book begins when at 13, she walks into a solicitor’s office to sue her parents for the legal rights to her body because she is expected to donate a kidney to Kate and she doesn’t want to.

While the book is primarily about Anna and Kate, there are plenty of other significant characters and good storylines. Anna’s lawyer, her legal guardian appointed by the court, brother Jesse, mother and father and her sister; Kate all feature prominently.

The book constantly has you thinking about the moral implications of decisions made; decisions that break an entire family down (even though they don’t notice because they’re all much too busy trying to keep Kate alive) and create a divide between father and mother. I dare anyone that reads the book to try and take sides easily, because quite simply, you can’t. Nobody is wrong. The caption on the front of the book says something like, ‘If you risk one child’s life to save another, are you a good mother or a very bad one’ and it sums up the dilemma quite well.

While the book contains a lot of medical terms and descriptions, it does not get bogged down by them. It is very humorous in parts and the ‘twist’ and the shocking dramatic end had a chill running through my spine. This is in fact one of the best books I have read in a long while; and I don’t give that accolade out lightly. If there is one book I’d recommend everyone reads, it’s this one.

Book info: The Divide. Nicholas Evans. London: Penguin Books Ltd. 2005. ISBN 0-399-15206-7

If you’ve read both The Horse Whisperer and The Loop, then you’re probably used to Nicholas Evans’ unpredictability.

In The Divide, he explores the underlying themes of love and loyalty in a marriage slowly going apart and the effect separation can has on the children. In doing so, Nicholas Evans proves himself capable of delving into the human psyche as Fyodor Dostoevsky, the late Russian master of that genre.

The Cooper family is an otherwise normal family – at least to everyone outside as well as the children. From the onset, we feel Benjamin Cooper’s – sexual rejection from his wife Sarah, the disdain in which he is held by his father-in-law and the near-perfect love his children share with him.

Abigail, the daughter, brilliant, worshipful of her father is devastated when he leaves her mother for another woman while Joshua is completely supportive of him and of Eve, the woman Benjamin left his wife for. His character is perhaps, the most complex of all as Nicholas Evans explores the conflicts between his love interests, drugs and his dedication to his sister.

Sarah, Benjamin’s wife and the mother of Abigail and Joshua is another complicated character. Her moods swing from hurt and blame to the despair at the realization that she is partly to blame for her husband’s desertion as evidenced by the seduction of her husband in an attempt to make up for the rejection and to prove she is not frigid.

Abigail’s death is the catalyst to the reunion of the family – although not in the way expected. While still legally married to Benjamin, Sarah gives her blessing to the union between him and Eve – and gets involved with the sheriff investigating their daughter’s death.

Nicholas Evans blends wit, humor and satire in an original style that can be called his – simple, clear language that converts his hours of long research into a work that can be understood by both the technical and non-technical. Unlike most writers I’ve come across, I always say ‘This guy knows what he’s talking about’ when I read a Nicholas Evans book.

The plot is smooth, and though bizarre in some ways, he manages to convince you. The speech is very realistic and true to life and one recognizes something that could have really happened.

The Divide is a very touching story, humorous in some places and evoking different feelings depending on the side one takes. Nicholas Evans has once again created a masterpiece in a genre that defies classification and can be called his.

I seem to have scared people away. I apologize for going too technical and promise to write shorter and more down-to-earth articles in future. Sorry, Buki.

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage

Ms May says: About a woman from Atlanta who is HIV positive and decides to return home to Michigan because Atlanta has become too small. I'm currently reading a couple of others by her so I'll let you know about those when I'm done. Pearl Cleage is the woman who wrote the poem for Oprah's Legends Ball called "We Speak Your Names". Great poem by the way.
Tori says: I really liked " What looks like Crazy.."the end was sorta anticlimatic for me, but it truly was a book from a very fresh very unapologetic perspective.


Chill Factor by Sandra Brown

Ms May Says: More on the Romance/Murder Mystery tip. I'm not into those type of books usually, but this was a good one. It grips you from the beginning and you end up rooting for the "supposed" bad guy along the way.

God's Gift To Women by Michael Baisden




SYNOPSIS: The night before leaving Chicago with his ten-year-old daughter for a job on a late-night talk show in Houston, Julian Payne has a sexual encounter with Olivia Brown, who follows him to Houston, determined to make him hers at any cost.

Anybody read it? How was it?

Be Careful What You Wish For by Cheryl Faye




SYNOPSIS (from this site): How do you measure the worth of a woman? Or determine the value of a man? In this sexy, suspenseful novel, Cheryl Faye takes on the hot-button issues facing men and women as they struggle to build meaningful, lasting relationships.

Who has read it? And what do you think about it?

What is the point really? LOL!!!

Noone has time for it... I think I will blog about this on my main blog and ask people to email me what books they are reading and their views, etc.

I am not going to give up on this blog just yet!!!

About the Book: Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, while baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?;Wickedly funny and devastatingly moving, 26a is an extraordinary first novel. Part fairytale, part nightmare, it moves from the mundane to the magical, the particular to the universal with exceptional flair and imagination. It is for anyone who has had a childhood, and anyone who knows what it is to lose one.

I haven't read this book but the reviews have been very good. I read one bad customer review of it on Amazon though. My friend went for her book signing at Jazz Hole (I think) in Lagos and bought this book for me and once I get it, I'll let you know what my thoughts are.

26a info:

• Shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2005),
• Shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year Award First Novel Category (2005),
• Winner of the British Book Awards: Writer of the Year (2006),
• Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers (2005)

The thing I've noticed about myself is that most movies that win Oscars are not my cup of tea and most books that win awards don't do anything for me either.

Has anyone read it? What did you think about it?

I have my Super Sudoku(16 by 16 Grid) book in my bag and I can't believe how rusty I've become!!! I used to be so good at Sudoku and Super Sudoku!!! I have to get back to it cos I feel slow!

I'm reading 2 books at the same time! Robert Ludlum's, The Icarus Agenda and I'm ashamed to say... Candace Bushnell's, Trading Up. I am working on saving money so I am not buying any new books... Right now I have about TEN unread books (~mostly chick lit)! This weekend I am going to join the library near home so I can read non-chick lit books!!!

I think i've had enough. Enough of chicklit! i'm currently reading "Bitter is the new black" and its soooooo cliche - same as the other 1 million chicklit books i've read - girl obssessed with clothes, makeup, shopping and guys - same crap different cover. I dont want to be anti-chicklist so i've decided i will not be reading anymore of these books till next year. My mandela Biography here i come. Will keep you guys posted!