Links for the next meeting - The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Below are some reviews and some discussion questions. They're quite wordy but might be a good start.

A review on Nabou.com

A review of it (as a children's book) on The Guardian

Some study questions on Spark Notes...

... & some on LitLovers

also - The Alchemist summarised and more on Wikipedia

It's been said that The Alchemist is essentially the same story as one of the tales in The Arabian Nights - The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through A Dream 

Links for the next meeting - 4 Vintage Classics

Since none of the books are particularly literary, but all have been made into films, it's probably as useful as anything to post links to the trailers!

Flowers in the Attic - Virginia Andrews



(They decided to completely remove any references to incest for the film)

The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M Auel



(Daryl Hannah!)

The Day of the Jackal - Fredrick Forsyth



(& for laughs, here's the remake with Bruce Willis as The Jackal, and Richard Gere as an IRA assassin co-opted to help track him down.  I missed that bit in the book too)



The Boys From Brazil - Ira Levin



Plus - Full film here

Links for the next meeting - The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

A five star review from Amazon -

"Highly imaginative, obsessive and truly magical novel by Daniel Mason. A combination of fiction, fantasy and travelogue, an ambitious but intriguing piece of work by Mason.
The plot seems to be travel fantasy - Edgar Drake, a piano tuner with perfection in Erards, travels in to darkest jungles of Burma and India.in 1886 to help the Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll. A sea voyage and boat journey in to the remotest possible place one would imagine to repair and tune a piano - a special piano, a peacemaker."

& a three star one - 

"This book has a lot going for it. The plotline is intriguing - an expert piano tuner, an authority on Erards, goes to darkest Burma to tune the piano of the eccentric but hugely effective Surgeon Major Carroll. The writer knows a lot about different aspects of his subject - sea travel in the late 19th. century, the topics which interest Carroll, Burmese history, the British presence in Burma, pianos and how to tune them .... all of that seems fine. It's fairly well written and moves forward in a competent way. But I seldom was really interested. Why? I think this is a book which works too hard. There is just too much validating detail, the stuff you need to make an exotic book like this come to life. It is too consciously written and it loses the naturalness and simplicity of a well-told tale. Once the tuner, Drake, got to Carroll's base I quite liked it, and I read the second half quickly, drawn on by the story, but I was never fully convinced and I did not find it compelling."

A history of the Shan State, from Wikipedia

Plus - a new documentary about Myanmar is coming out

Links for the next meeting - The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

The book has some questions for book groups at the end to guide discussion, but there are three quick links...

This is an interview with the author

And some three star reviews from Amazon, (which I thought gave some of the more balanced views on the book).

and surprise surprise, the film version is currently in production ...

Links for the next meeting - Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka

Wikipedia is useful for background on Sri Lanka, the Civil War and the National Team
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Civil_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka_national_cricket_team

A couple of reviews:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/the-chinaman-shehan-karunatilaka-review
http://jaiarjun.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/absent-spinner-cricket-and-life-in.html
http://bitethebook.com/2012/04/17/shehan-karunatilakas-chinaman-the-legend-of-pradeep-matthew-2/

And following on from the above, an interview with the author:
http://bitethebook.com/2012/05/25/book-chewing-an-interview-with-shehan-karunatilaka-author-of-chinaman/

And mixing fiction and reality again:
http://pradeepmathew.com/
& also
http://thegreatpradeepmathew.com/
& finally - Articles by WG Karunasena
http://kreedasl.com/

Links for the next meeting - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Wikipedia gives the plot, and the background to the story

Spark Notes gives some context and explanations

Spark Notes also has some suggested questions, including:


"What role does social class play in Great Expectations? What lessons does Pip learn from his experience as a wealthy gentleman? How is the theme of social class central to the novel?"

A five star review on Amazon:

"This is my favourite Dickens novel. I would not dispute that several others are its equal but they do not pull at my heartstrings in quite the same way.I doubt seeing them knocked about on TV would have annoyed me quite so much."

& a one star review


"Does it make me a philistine that I thought this book was simply awful? I suspect not. This book is spectacularly dull; it's inane, directionless, confused, dreary, circumlocutory and self-indulgent. "

Links for the next meeting - To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

There is so much information about To Kill a Mockingbird, with a plethora of on-line notes about hypocracy, symbolism, contrasting characters and "foil pairs"  (and the meaning of their names) - even the Symbolism of the Tree and Boo as Christ (Yahoo voices):
- the use of language ,
-growing up,
-conditioning/conforming to be accepted/becoming independent,/who belongs where
-fear and courage  etc.
-hypocracy (Is Dolphus Raymond a hypocrite?- he protects his children by sending them North)
:it has been really difficult to find a few to the point articles that really does justice to the complexity, delicacy and power of the book. Set in time in 1935  but published in 1960 , it was published when the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum (Rosa Parks was 1955) and Kennedy's Presidential Commission into the Status of Women was 1961.  It is described as a Bildungsroman (growing up) and Southern Gothic in that it incorporates the grotesque, describes derelict settings and sinister events in order to explore social events and uses suspense (eg Jem and Scout being followed by Bob Ewell at the end) - so Harper Lee is using a traditional format (the book was originally submitted as short stories to the publisher).

The moral growth of children in To Kill a Mockingbird

Themes, motifs and symbols - the book begins with the ending 

Symbols and symbolism - flowers /Tim Johnson

Background to 'jim crow' laws - circumstances in which the book was set

Calpurnia's double life

Stereotypes, assumption of guilt prior to trial