Bookclub News January 2025
Dear Readers, our bookclub does not shrink from a challenge. Our choice was to boldly go into 2025 with Italo Calvino's experimental novel "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller", published in 1979 and now considered a classic. Our votes varied widely, before settling on an average score of 7, Recommended. The book examines what it is to write a novel, or read it or interpret it, through a series of episodes based on a journey through different loosely connected stories. . The reader has just time to absorb a new set of characters and a new plot when it ends in suspense and leads to another title. Inevitably one tries to find a logic binding the various episodes together when perhaps simply going with the flow would be a better option. Too many beginnings, not enough conclusions? A tiresome behind the scenes documentary of interest only to other writers? But through it all runs Calvino's masterful writing, his sense of fun and remarkable narrative...