Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

Ooooh. Couldn't leave you without this little tidbit I found.

HBO Praying for American Gods

Now, after reading Neverwhere for Book Club, I am not Neil Gaiman's biggest and brightest fan. To be honest, I found his writing confusing and kind of pointless. I like fantasy but I think I prefer it in films and TV shows than in novels. Teen fiction kind of gets away with it but in adult novels I find it slightly ludicrous (I know, big old hypocrite). So in some ways, it could be really interesting to see a film essentially written by an author I'm not too keen on. I'd like to know whether the movie variation makes any dents in my opinion.

A story about a teenage wizard facing off against a dark lord beats one about a sparkling, lovesick vampire anyday.

So my teen fiction love affair remains unwavering at present. I wish I could say I was attempting to move on and be a grown up with my reading but I'm not. I like living sqaurely in my literary-youth. And because of that I was very excited to find this brilliant article on new teen movies ariving soon.

The Next Harry Potter or Twilight?

This little article is great - I was excited to find that Wake by Lisa McMann is being made into a film - although I think it's kind of funny that everything is supposed to be "the new Harry Potter/Twilight".

Nothing beats Harry Potter. And I shall be a Gryffindor till I die.

Actually, I'd probably be a Hufflepuff, but, you know, I like the idea of all that partying.

You have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

Yeah. So. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I didn’t read it, I’m afraid to say. Not through any overwhelming desire not to, just from a general lack of enthusiasm. I will attempt to read it in the next few months, as the impression I got from the group was that it was definitely worth it.

Group was a little distracted for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (it was sunny and we had barbeque food, you know how it is) but a good ole’ natter was still had by all. I even attempted to put in my two pennies worth (*whiny voice* I’ve seen the film!) but I couldn’t really contribute properly. Hence why I should always read the book.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was pretty well received and scored fairly average. Since our first few meetings, we’ve become a lot more conservative with our scoring; our first book still has the highest score.

Overall Score: 7.5/10
Next Month's Choice from: MB
Next Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first rule of Fight Club is...

Gah. My Book Club reviews have completely disappeared over the past few months and I am kicking myself a little for that. Book Club hasn’t gone on hiatus and I have been going to the meetings, I just have been very lax in posting a review on either of the previous books.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk was our February title and we met, as always, in our faithful local to discuss the book. It’s the first time we had our brand new group together (all eight of us; SJ, MB, AG, SA, CB, CR, HB and me!). We’re still an all female group and someone made the very good point last week that we should probably try and include a token male at some point. So we met, we talked, and then we came second in the Sunday night pub quiz…because, of course, book clubs are awesome.

We were, as a group, completely aware that we weren’t exactly the target audience. The novel is for boys, full of gore and disgust, and those things didn’t exactly fill some of the group with happy fuzzy feelings. Although most of us enjoyed the ambiguity and really different nature of the writing style, it isn’t for everyone, and its most certainly a departure from standard dramatic fiction.

Fight Club is a book so visual and graphic in its descriptions, it could have been lifted straight from the movie script. The film version of the book did enter into the discussion on more than one occasion and although there are some significant differences (mainly near the end), its one of the few adaptations where we felt the book was done justice.

Palahniuk is an immense writer; filled with passion and fire, his writing is powerful in its venom. Since we had previously read American Psycho (Brett Easton Ellis) the similarities with that were also marked. Palahniuk has said that Ellis was an inspiration and the violence in the book definitely shows that.

Overall though, the novel came out ok. Myself, SJ, AG, and MB did all recognise that had we not read Ellis beforehand, we probably would have enjoyed Fight Club more. It still got a pretty decent score though and we came away with another novel (what I’m going to describe as a bloke’s book) for the next month.

Overall Score: 7/10
Next Month's Choice is from: SJ
Next Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey