HRC Ravenclaw Common Room discussion

I really enjoyed the February selection, and thought the ending of his book-in-a-book was fantastic. Brady's life was brilliantly paralleled by his rambling, directionless novel, and I felt that Chabon did an excellent job of making his characters endearingly horrible. Overall I gave it a 4/5.

I'm really glad to hear others enjoyed it! It's one of my favorites because Grady is so hard to like, but so easy to root for. He also exemplifies what is sometimes hard to articulate about being a creative person, that sometimes, being a great artist means being a not so great person.

I haven't finished yet (because we started watching Game of Thrones, so I haven't been reading much :p), but definitely like this book--especially after Juliette, which I *really* struggled through after the first quarter of the book. I was sad to see so many people disliked it! I'm just about halfway through now, but have a hard time putting it down. I like the perspective, though Grady does seem full of himself, like you said...he's the kind of main character you love to hate! looking forward to finishing.

I'm about 50 pages from the end. It's been a bit slow to get going, but I am actually really enjoying it. Rather than loving to hate Grady, I felt it was definitely more of a 'hate to love' - even though he does some dreadful things in the course of the book, never mind in the rest of his life, I found myself rooting for him and wanting things to work out. It does feel a bit 'oh what now?!' at this point, but the fact that it's funny and sad is making me want to keep going with it.

I really didn't like this book. There is only like one page in the whole book where I thought okay maybe this is going to pick up but then it just got worse! I don't believe you need to suffer to be an artist and so the whole book my mind was just screaming at him to start taking some responsibility for his life. I feel like Grady has never made any real decisions in his whole life. He has just kind of done something to try and keep everybody happy without ever having actually thought about it. Maybe I need to be some kind of pot head or druggy to understand...

Nicole - I agree with you on this one.

That being said, I love that we can discuss the book and have different opinions without being mean to each other, and that with the many Claws there will always be lots of opinions!