Second Helpings Social; We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Another fabulous cheese, wine, and book discussion took place last Thursday when a small collection of city folk met to indulge in the famed smoked applewood along with the opinions of nature and nurture that resonates with Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

Those who did not know the meaty "twist" when beginning the book all expressed the utter shock when Fowler revealed it in such an off-hand comment,her prose, "I'm sure you've probably guessed by now that...." well no, Ms Fowler, we hadn't guessed, not expected such a thing. Most of the us had build up the twist in our own heads to be somewhat more extreme than what was the case in point. One lady in the group admitted that she'd calculated the sister of the main character Rosemary, to have died of a secret cause and not explained to Rosemary. Many others had equally morbid estimations about what had happened to the sibling.

There was heated debate about animal testing and human relations, and how parents could, unknowingly, also be testing their children in way that is deemed as negative as scientists testing animals.

The group recalled own sibling situations and how they related to Rosemary, but no-one could offered a story of such extremities of how Rosemary must have felt so isolated from two societies, a loss of belonging was certainly sympathised. However, it was the overall consensus that at times the book swerved into a factual memoir and lost the art of story-telling which is what would have made each reader evermore, and rightly so, gripped.

We spoke of the recently released Short List. The group became somewhat split, in questioning WAACBO's position on the list, Was it worthy? Yes there are some momentous and grandiose novels which made the short list so the addition  of the charming, little yellow book merely whets the appetite before devouring the big guns. Small and quaint, the subject matter certainly added a vast array of opinions and view points, another successful evening all round.

Congrats to the rest of the Short List Nominees. I would now recommend, that as the Winner announcement date is approaching, (9th October), let's all power through with the Short list, and then, if we have days spare, to continue with the rest of those which remain on the long list.

The next social event will be a joint discussion evening of The Lives of Others and The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

I'll keep you posted about a date; most likely a Thursday.

Guest Review (4); A Bucket of Ice for O'Rourke

Gracing our screens today is the second review by Chantal Lyons who is steadily making her way through the long list. Her stark and honest reviews, especially in the below, bring light to our epic quest as she interweaves her own humor and opinions of the books relating them to mainstream crazes and media "sensations."

Guest Reviewer; Chantal Lyons

Ultimately, I can only give this book 2.5 stars out of 5... or maybe a 3 – but only because my reading of it has coincided so harmoniously with a recent internet phenomenon.

I really, really struggled to get through the first third. I could not stand its smarminess; the way that it constantly digressesed to obsess over its own cleverness. When I was not wading through those sections, I was scanning quickly over the long baseball ones. It really didn’t help that the blurb didn’t match up, which left me confused and suspicious about how much care was put into the book’s production. But, like pushing something heavy on wheels and finding it gets easier as the momentum builds, I eventually started to slide through the story as a reader should. There were even flashes of brilliance amongst the tacky prose, like “the enduring silence of undiscovered caves”, or the occasional resonating quip about humanity.

Paul, the main character, isn’t likeable in the slightest, and that doesn’t work here. He was so jagged that I didn’t care what happened to him, and his opinion-change on page 204 because he saw a particular name on a dusty pack of old beer in a store seemed to completely disregard all the sharp scepticism he’d displayed before. However. In the week gone by, I did find myself able to finally connect with Paul, thanks to the ice bucket challenge. Paul rants frequently about his alienation from and rejection of the internet and the world in communion with it. This I dully regarded until my Facebook feed began to fill with automatically-playing videos of ice bucket challenges, and nominations for me to participate next. And, with the same determination of Paul, I have ignored them, my hackles rising at being told to “make a donation to ALS if you can’t do the challenge” (I say what charities I donate to, thanks very much). I bet Paul would have a good rant about it.

But back to the book itself. I was fairly relieved to have finished it, and I can’t imagine I’ll think much about it after this full stop.

Christmas Come Early and a Save the Date Card

Miss Jones was certainly smiling last week when several pretty large, brown jiffy envelopes graced my desk.

 I must give a note of thanks to the fabulously generous folk at Chatto & Windus and Johnathon Cape who sent me ( and my web of readers and reviewers) some complimentary copies of the following:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan 

The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee

J,  Howard Jacobson

Gosh, these babies are as meaty and juicy as any burger and I can't wait to start devouring them. Message me if you want to nab one of these tasty morsels to add to your own quest route.

This leads me on the the next Drinks & Discusion evening. The last one was a resounding success and therefore many more will follow. 

Mark in your diaries, or calendars, or on a post-it note or write it on the back of your hand, the date of Thursday 11th September at 6:30pm when we will meet and discuss that little yellow book of We Are All Completley Beside Ourselves and then I will hand out the books above for some of that faithful book swappage we love as it saves our pounds.

RSVP please so i know how many to book a table for. 
We'll be back at Bedford & Strand if that helps you plan your journey.

Guest Review (3): WAACBO

My my, we are building quite a collection of the reviews here on this quest. It gives me utter joy in receiving so many. The below review is really quite glorious. I advise you all read it, and roll with it. May it move and shake you into writing your own review of one the long (soon to be short-) list books!

Guest Reviewer: Jemima Warren

Occupation: Works at Palgrave Macmillan

 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler



I hate novels about “issues”. And I especially hate ones about animal issues. So when I read the premise of Karen Joy Fowler’s tenth novel – look away from this review if you don’t want to know what that is – I was dubious. A chimpanzee raised in a human family? Here we go. Man’s inhumanity to beast, the evils of vivisection, why-can’t -all-of-creation-just-get-along? Blah blah blah.


There were certainly times when I felt WAACBO veered into that sort of humanitarian point-making. I never really felt that the character of Rosemary’s brother, Lowell, ever developed beyond a two-dimensional spokesman for the radical animal rights movement, for example.


But that aside, the novel is a complete joy, from hilarious observations about airline customer care, to the discovery of a lost ventriloquist’s dummy and, above all, the central voice of Rosemary, honest, funny and (often unwittingly) wise.


“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, as Larkin has taught us. The fucking up in Fowler’s novel is of both the most unusual and the most ordinary kind. Her realisations about herself and about her family resonate with us all. Sentences like, “I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do”, strike a pang in the heart of any child, those with siblings and those without.


Reaching the end of the novel, like growing up, you realise that the way you thought things were, is actually, quite wrong. We are, like the title, all completely beside ourselves in that, going on in parallel to the things we tell ourselves, is the actual truth about our existence. Towards the end of the novel, this exchange between Rosemary and her mother:


“…You were a happy, happy child”
“Was I? I don’t remember”


Families are prone to develop collective memory. This novel wonderfully explores how fallacious – and dangerous – that can be.