34. Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons - Lorna Landvik

Oh good. A book I actually enjoyed (aside from a couple of really nitpicky points). That attempt at Thomas Nashe really dragged me down. I almost think that is why my reading for pleasure really slowed during University .. I was reading a lot of stuff I didn't necessarily understand (or want to put the effort into understanding truth be told) and some stuff I didn't really enjoy and it sort of sucked all enjoyment out of reading anything for a good while. Maybe that is the reverse of how it should work, maybe most people would overcompensate by reading more of what they did like, but I have never claimed to work on a normal scale.

I really have to get better at writing as I finish books because now I find myself struggling to put into words what it was that I liked about this book. I guess I found that I could relate to the idea of a close group of friends starting a bookclub because in a sense that is what a few of my friends did a couple of years ago. So all the stuff about getting off topic at the meetings and interspersing talk about the book with random chatter about day to day life really felt familiar. Their bookclub was a lot smaller than mine (although with busy schedules most of our meetings only end up being about 5 people) and they all lived on the same block (whereas we are spread out over the city) but the closeness and the laughter and the occasional disputes and above all the strength of friendship was the same. I also liked how the books they read were listed with a little blurb about why they were chosen or what was served at the meeting - even though it did add about a million titles to my reading list.

Each chapter focused on a different member and the perspective shifted and that was interesting because it isn't often that you hear a story from all angles. What bothered me a little was how some narrators were first person and some were third person and it didn't seem to follow a set pattern so every once in a while it would take a few minutes to figure out whose turn it was to narrate. And for once you had a series of strong female characters while the husbands kind of got sidelined - there was a bit of an implication that the women were individually unique and strong but their strength was magnified by the close relationship they shared. Part of me always likes reading books about groups of friends because there is such a distinctive flair to friendships and relationships and often it is hard to capture that but I think this book did a good job, to detail the bookclub as a whole but also how smaller pairings worked and had their own dynamic. I thought a lot about my girlfriends and what each of them bring to my life and how we work as a whole (often disfunctionally :p) and it just reminded me that there are a lot of things that would have been immeasurably tougher to get through without my girls at my side.