Double feature
The June meeting didn’t take place as the library was closed for staff training so 9 of us discussed both books at the July meeting.
Our June book was “The Famished Road” by Ben Okri. The book won the Booker Prize in 1991 making the author the youngest ever winner at the age of 32. He was also Knighted in 2025. He describes his work as dream logic, as he was growing up his mother didn’t correct him directly, she told him stories to illustrate the lesson she was trying to teach him.
The cultural differences between Nigeria and the UK, and drawing on the spiritual side of Nigerian religions, made the story difficult to totally understand and hard going. Four of us didn’t finish the book and three of us staggered through it. Members commented that the book was like Groundhog Day or a case of the Emperor’s new clothes and that it would have made a good novella.
We gave the book the lowest marking ever of 2.1/10.
Our book for July was “We begin at the end” by Chris Whitaker. The book falls into the genre of stories around the poorer areas and people of America and reminded us of books like ‘Education’ and ‘Where the Crawdads sing’. The story revolves around Duchess, her little brother and the shooting of her addict mother. It took a while for some of us to get into the story but we felt it improved as the story became intriguing and there was a real unexpected twist at the end. This is another book where the title only becomes clear at the end.
The book is character driven, there are a lot of individuals carrying a lot of guilt for various reasons, in general the adults in the story were very understanding and we liked the characters. We gave it a marking of 8/10.