Yippee! It's time for another batch of books to read together! We have another round of voting completed and we have another batch of great books to read together. The book for October is Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Feel free to read our book club books in any order that you choose and when you've finished reading, come back here and tell us what you think. Please label spoilers. We have a new trick for hiding spoilers. Type whatever you want and then highlight the spoiler portion and click the + button above and select Spoiler. If that doesn't work (seems to be funky on Macs) just highlight your text and change the color to white >>>This is a super secret spoiler alert!<<< like I did right there. Spoiler Better to be safe than sorry, don't give away the ending! Just a note, anyone is welcome to join in with our book club reading at any time and join in the discussion! The more the merrier! Happy reading!
I read this one back in January. I loved it. I really wish I had read David Copperfield first to appreciate this modern day version.
This book was a solid 5 star book for me. I loved this book so much! It was such a sad story with so many awful things, but it was so beautifully written. I also listened to parts of it on audiobook which was excellent as well. I would have actually loved to listen to the entire thing, but I can read faster, so I switched to the book whenever possible and only listened while I was at work when I could because I couldn't stand to be away from the story. There are so many wonderful characters in this book. Many of them were dealt horrible life circumstances, but also had a lot of great things and people woven into their lives too. This book is quite an epic journey that sucked me in from the very first chapter.
So, I have this book. I have started reading it... but I'm having trouble getting into it. It's a hard change from what I'm used to.... I may take a break and try something in between and give it a go again. I feel like it's similar to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or The Nightingale where you have to read like 75 pages to get into it.... and then I will love it.
I read this back in May. I love Barbara Kingsolver but this one wasn't my favorite. I'd probably give it a 3.5/5 stars. I felt like she was taking a bunch of poverty and Appalachia tropes and building a story around them. And while I liked Demon as a character, I didn't enjoy watching him slowly unravel or generally get sh@t upon by the bluebird of life. It's strange because on another book thread, I mentioned the Goldfinch which has a similar theme of a kid whose mom dies and then goes through a series of hardships but I LOVED that book whereas this one just left me kinda meh. I think it bugs me that Demon never took any action to help himself and just rode along on the goodwill or badwill of the people around him. The general helplessness was frustrating and annoying. Maybe that's realistic in some ways but I'm not sure I read books to just slog through something depressing just because it might be realistic.
