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Fiction: "The Rotter's Club," by Jonathan Coe
This was the first book that we read in my book club at work. It follows the prep school years of a group of chums in Birmingham, England in the mid-70's. At a superficial level, the book is about the standard problems faced by the protagonists (although some of the peripheral characters run into some very heavy problems indeed). There was plenty to keep me entertained, as the kids struggled through adolescence, dealing with irritating brothers and sisters, uncertainty about girls, and so on. The kids seemed unrealistically precocious at times, but actually that's probably just as well: reading about actual adolescents might be pretty irritating, or just boring.

Beyond the day-to-day activities of our heroes, there are some deeper themes; notably, inter-class rivalries are apparent at school and at the jobs of the kids' parents. It's possible that the author intended these themes to be central to the book, given how many pages feature some kind of class conflict, but in fact this theme is more of a backdrop than a central element.

On the whole, Iiked the book pretty well: I thought that a few nonstandard narrative tools worked well---like giving some news items from the school newspaper---and I liked the characters and wanted to know what was going to happen to them. Although not exactly a page-turner, I certainly had no problem maintaining my interest in the book.

Unfortunately my liking of the book put me in the minority in the book club: Emily didn't think it was good at all, Mark didn't read it, and Buvana finished most of it but only by pushing herself at the very end of the four-week reading period. Only Jean and I seemed to enjoy it appreciably.

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