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This one may already have been mentioned, as it has been on the best sellter list for a while. "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens. I just finished reading it, and enjoyed it.

Cattleman - I was thinking of picking that book up some time soon. It was recommended in my online book club!

I just finished this past weekend "Normal People" by Sally Rooney. Actually, it was that book that made me even join this site in hopes to speak and have a discussion about it. It turned out to be very different from what I had imagined from even the short summaries. My little expectations were superseded by the surmounting effects of the psyche. Just my opinion!

I've read Normal People by Sally Rooney. I have to say I didn't think too much of it, but then I don't think I could be described as its target audience. I think she can write but I also think that she didn't have much to write about in this novel.
What was your expectation of it ? Mine was that given the profile she has been given, there should have been more substance to the work. Compare it with Anna Burns' novel Milkman, for example.

vizitelly wrote:I've read Normal People by Sally Rooney. I have to say I didn't think too much of it, but then I don't think I could be described as its target audience. I think she can write but I also think that she didn't have much to write about in this novel.
What was your expectation of it ? Mine was that given the profile she has been given, there should have been more substance to the work. Compare it with Anna Burns' novel Milkman, for example.

To be perfectly honest, I had no expectations for this book at all. It's not my normal style of reading. While, I agree the style of writing wasn't anything to quite rave about, dull almost, like the whole book had a dullness to it, if I were to imagine it as a film it was in greyscale the whole way through. I also liked that the most about the book, how from beginning to end, the mood stayed somber. In fact, I was so irritated by the book that I had to admit I liked it. The ending threw me for a loop, yet in it's utmost unresolved way, it summed it up exactly how it probably should've ended. There was something about the nothingness that really made this book one I probably will never read again but happy to have read it, ya know?

I've never read Milkman. I probably will now that you've mentioned it. My next book on my list to read right now is Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, waiting for it to ship in .

Yes, some writers play deliberate downbeat, probably looking for an evenness of tone; kind of like the literary equivalent of modal music. It's a clever trick, sustaining that for 80 or 90 thousand words, but it must be very boring to write. Normal People is essentially a rites of passage novel - ho hum - but I think it ultimately fails because what is needed is an engagement with the characters: you have like or loathe them. Insipid and self-possessed doesn't really cut the mustard. The great rites of passage novels - Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn. Treasure Island, Catcher In The Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, A High Wind in Jamaica and so on - have that 'grab' about them and you are transported to that other place and time.

This is no literary work of art that's for sure. I'd never say that. There's more about this book that I didn't like than I did like, yet it made me want to continue this drab story, and that in itself is what exceeded my expectations. I wish the spotlighting of emotional distress/mental health weren't such a dull extreme, like it never quite crossed the line, yet it was obvious. It dabbled for a bit with it and then just beat around the bush most of the time and that bothered me as well. I think it'd have been much better had it crossed lines but than it wouldn't have such it's melancholy tone that I appreciated so much. Inner turmoil and appreciation for the irony that Normal People explains perfectly that no one is quite normal.

I hadn't thought about it in that way; I was waiting for it to become something more, but of course that wasn't the writer's intention. It did strike me that a writer can get caught between writing from direct experience and writing as a witness - and it felt that those lines were blurred.

LanDroid wrote:
KevinMcCabe recommends Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky in another thread.

If I'm going to take on Dostoevsky I'm going with The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot. Crime and Punishment strikes me as a mismatch for high summer.

Knowing how hard it is to sustain discussions of books (easy to sustain arguments), I'd always lean toward shorter fiction. I was thinking of rereading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. It's about a Catholic priest who has fathered a child. I'm sure I didn't fathom it well when I first read it. It is a very serious book about love and religion.