I picked most of them, but we alternated a bit. One of our members picked George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, which I don’t think I otherwise ever would have read.

YES. Like all of Ishiguro’s books in that respect. I am excited to read it again, and to see the film.

I don’t blame you! If it had been more obviously about 9/11 I think I’d have liked it even less.

I am pleased my book club got me to read this book, because it’s not something I would normally bother with. But it didn’t convert me to being a huge fan of literary (so-called) fiction. I am still deeply skeptical.

I actually thought he didn’t try hard enough to pull the storylines together. That he made the effort at all surprised and pleased me — I was expecting the whole book to be a disconnected meditation on loss, or something. So I was a little pleased that he bothered imposing a, you know, narrative on the book overall. :p

I haven’t read anything else by McCann so cannot make any recommendations. I’m planning to forget about him for now unless someone changes my mind.

Well, we’ve only had the one meeting, and most of the members work in the same building so we have many opportunities to talk about fun stuff. But I think it’s possible as time goes on we’ll be doing more chatting and eating and joking around than talking about our books.

How fun! As the person running it, do you pick out the books? We do a thing where we alternate choosing books, and whoever’s turn it is, that person chooses three books and we vote. That way nobody feels singly responsible for a book if everyone ends up loathing it. :p

I hope your work book club’s new iteration comes out awesome!

See, yes! I hated the way Tillie (the prostitute mother) spoke in her section — it felt so, so contrived. There were occasional moments when McCann got off a good line, but I didn’t think he did a good job at all with making vivid characters.

However, I disagree about the 9/11 thing. The book is all about figuring out how to define yourself when your defining thing gets taken away. There are all these palpable absences that thread through the book — the sons who died in Vietnam, the brother who’s killed in the car crash, etc. — which plays up the absence of the Twin Towers after 9/11. The point McCann’s making (I believe) is that the 1974 wire walk changed people’s attitudes to the Twin Towers, made them part of New York in a way. Before they were a development everyone hated, and then they became (partly, I think McCann implies, because of the wire walk) a defining feature of the city. The link to 9/11 is the ability of the city to define itself with them and without them.

Anyway that’s what I thought.