When i said I was going to be stuck at home for a while recovering from foot surgery, a friend pressed two books on me by her favourite author, Jonathan Coe. She could not believe that I had never heard of or read any of his books. Well, now I have read two of his books - The Rotters Club and The Closed Circle. I think you can safely assume I won't be reading any more books by Jonathan Coe. Nor will I ever make it as a book critic - because I just cannot understand why these novels were so well received and critically acclaimed. Seriously - I found The Rotters Club really frustrating reading and it left the characters in limbo - so I am quite pleased I did persevere and read The Closed Circle, because it picked up where the first novel ended and gave me some closure on those damned characters!
Both novels were fine really, one story across two novels about a group of very different individuals, their lives and the political climates that they have lived through. The attitudes toward Thatcher and then Blair I think do well to describe the feelings of a generation that the Labour Party (or New Labour) has let down, shattering everything they believed in. BUT I think because both books are covered in acclaim and adoration from all sorts of newspapers (including the Times) and individuals (Nick Hornby, Jeremey Paxman, Paul Meron) I expected more. I expected a lot more.
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I have never heard of that guy either, although this seems quite interesting? "The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim." The central character was to be "a product of the social media boom," and "the sort of person with hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to talk to when his marriage breaks up.".
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