There was hardly anyone at Swallow bookworms last night - a mixture of reasons nice and nasty - but discussion both there and during the last month suggests that not a soul liked the book, Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.
It was a book about teenage angst and bullying which brought in every stereotype of which the author could think. One member summed it up as "too many ideas, too little heart" which seem about to describe it. Someone suggested that it might have been written for young (teenage?) male readers, but our youngest male reader (23) - and the only male present last night - absolutely loathed it and didn't get more than about a tenth of the way through. He was not the only one who thought life too short to wade through such unpleasantness, though I was among those who stuck it out to the end. Whether we finished it or not, we all agreed that it was a thoroughly unpleasant, sloppily written book.
Next month we have Selected Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Uncle Alf as I prefer to call him based on some genealogical miscalculations by my great-grandfather (right surname, right place, wrong family).
