The Big Bath Read 2014 discussion

Introduce yourself! And tell us what you're reading now… Or why you liked the idea of The Sea Change.

I'll start… I'm Viv and I'm the artistic director for the Bath Literature Festival. I'm also a journalist, author (of I Laughed, I Cried, a memoir about stand-up comedy) and reviewer of way too many books, 300 of which get delivered to my home address every month, much to my spouse's great annoyance. (I review between five and ten books a month.)

I wanted to read The Sea Change after I met Cathryn Summerhayes, Joanna Rossiter's agent at an event for Curtis Sittenfeld, who's one of my favourite authors (they share a UK agent). Cathryn mentioned The Sea Change in passing and I was intrigued because Joanna is from Salisbury, near where I grew up. Once I read the blurb I was hooked: I wanted to know what happened in that area during the Second World War.

Also: confession. I really like the cover. And I am hugely biased by covers. There, I said it. Now it is someone else's turn.

My name is Naye I've never heard of The Sea change but it sounds like a really good read ..I just read Struggle by PA Jones and I'm excited to pick up my next book so far I got an email from E.L Todd asking to read and review their book so I'm excited to see how that book turns out ..I'm picky about The cover of books..it makes it hard to pick up the book and give it a try.. haha thats so sad but I'm working on it i swear! ok I am going to stop before i embarrass myself more

Hi Naye, welcome to the Big Bath Read! This is a group where it is not possible to embarrass yourself. (I say this knowing that most people in the group have not actually read the book yet…) :)

Thank you, Ruth! I am not sure what the policy is about spoilers. We need to be able to discuss the book, right?! There is a whole spoilers function here on Goodreads where you can write what you want and then it hides it… I will look up how you do this and report back. But I agree that the Second World War bits are stronger than the tsunami bits. Although by the end I was more on board with the tsunami… (unfortunate choice of words)

IT WORKS! So if you want to do spoilers, you have to do this

add without the speech marks "(view spoiler)[" before and after what you don't want revealed to everyone (hide spoiler)]

oh this is annoying -- you have to do this

left hand arrow ADD SPOILER right hand arrow

You see the arrow keys on the bottom right hand corner (shift comma, shift full stop). You hit those either side of the spoiler to hide it

like this ARROW LEFT write spoiler here ARROW RIGHT

I cannot actually put the arrows as it hides them > or does it? < (they need to be the other way round to work)

This is the High Court Judge of Spoiler Threads

not quite!

1. ARROW LEFT
2. write spoiler
3. ARROW RIGHT

That's it! The slash is a mistake

Amazingly enough, this is my first time participating in a group read on Goodreads! I couldn't resist participating after meeting Viv at a dinner last year and laughing my way through three courses with her!

The book just arrived so looking forward to diving in and catching up on the discussion. Thank goodness you've got the spoilers all sorted out! :)

Great to see you here, Suzanne! Yes we are ON TOP of the spoiler situation *coughs*

Lots of people in Bath getting excited about this discussion online and IRL -- we have five book group meetings coming up (two of them sold out) and two "Meet the Author" sessions (one sold out). Whoop!