Lucca English Book Club

Our book for February 2025 is Orbital by Samantha Harvey:  A team of astronauts in the International Space Station observes the planet Earth and each other. Their communications dwell on the fragility of human life and of the planet itself. Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. The Sunday Times described is as “Stunning, an uplifting book.” Reviews range from "Ravishingly Beautiful" to "Mind-numbingly Boring", so it will be sure to lead to some interesting discussion when we meet on Wednesday February 26th. Check us out on Facebook for more details  https://www.facebook.com/groups/116095441736716/

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...