Chris’s Comments (group member since Mar 29, 2012)

Chris’s comments from the Idle Book Club group.

Discuss, if you like!

Simon wrote: "Seldom am I glad that a book is short and regard that fact as a good thing for had it been longer I fear would have skipped all meals and instead spent the entire day doing nothing but reading. Reg..."
You can send questions/comments/observations to books@idlethumbs.net. I imagine we'll also refer to this thread.

We announced the book club podcast in our Kickstarter video:
http://kickstarter.com/projects/idlet...
We've mentioned the first book in a few places, including our forums, but since our website is basically placeholder right now we don't have a good way to clearly get information out there.

We don't really have a formal process for picking books at this point. This one was chosen because I reviewed it on my Tumblr ( http://chrisremo.tumblr.com/post/1724... ) which prompted Sean and Nick to each read it, and Jake to plan to read it. So we figured it would make a good first selection. Since I essentially "chose" this one, I imagine the next one will be suggested by Jake or Sean. In the future maybe we'll let readers vote on a few choices as well.

Greg wrote: "Throwing in this awesome Vladimir Nabokov quote from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight that seems to apply precisely to this book as well:

"Remember that what you are to..."

Yeah that pretty much nails it.

I think that's fair enough, but it didn't bother me. The event may not be a common occurrence, but as That That Could Happen To Humans I think it's fair game for a realistic work of fiction. Certainly, more outrageous things have happened in the world.

To me, what mattered more was the way it was addressed in the reactions of the characters and the interior life of the narrator, which were all convincing to me. I think a big part of the point of the novel is that there was this terrible, impossible-to-simply-guess event that had a profound impact on the narrator's social circle. Much of what I took from the novel is that we form opinions about people based on extremely limited information, and yet almost everyone has massively important and unknowable events in his or her life that inform their actions and their interactions with us. Everyone's perspective on everyone else is extremely relative. The event in question only seems out of the blue and extreme to us, because we come upon in the same way the narrator does. Had we experienced this book from another character's perspective it would have been almost unrecognizable. The point (to me) is less the event itself and more the asymmetrical effect it has on those involved.

I didn't find this book to be melodramatic. It seemed entirely plausible to me, both in terms of the events described and the characters' reactions to them. If anything, I found it to be the opposite--for much of the novel outward emotional restraint seemed to be the order of the day, and that was at the root of much of the conflict.