Meeting Wrap-Up, January 8, 2011

We had a great turnout thanks in part to a notice about the meeting appearing in the San Leandro Times. Many people who had not been aware that the group was still going turned up for the meeting. The book of the month was 1906: A Novel by James Dalessandro, and Ron led the discussion. Most of those present, even those who found the character development weak and the plot implausible, found the book a good read. The key element seemed to be interest in the real historic scandal surrounding the story told in the book. At the same time, many readers felt the author had undermined the historical aspects of the story by bringing in characters and events from other periods in San Francisco history to give the book more color. The group seemed to be just about evenly divided between "liked it," "hated it," and "meh."

So my question is: Historic fiction (or fictionalized history), love it, hate it, or meh? Personally, I both love it or hate it depending on the individual book and how well it is done. I have read quite a few novels by E.L. Doctorow and really enjoyed them, in particular Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate (my particular favorite). If I had the time, I would really like to go back and reread one or two of those and figure out why I was drawn into to them and not into this book. Anybody else? What do you think? The San Leandro Library has six novels by E.L. Doctorow for your reading pleasure if you want to give one a spin. Some people just hate, hate, hate historical fiction and are not going to be happy no matter what, and when I read badly executed historical fiction, I can totally sympathize with that view.

One book of historical fiction that I can recommend to anyone who has some free time and who doesn't adhere strictly to the 50-page rule, is The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy. It is an imagining of the lives of three philosophers, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore, in and around the times their lives intersected at Cambridge University. Here is a link to a review in the New York Review of Books. It was loaned to me by a friend whose father was a philosophy major and had given it to her as a gift. It took me a looooooong time to get into it, but I was so glad I stuck it out.