Firstly we discussed the book choices for the next few months, these have been added to the blog for everyone to see.
Many of the bookclub members didn't enjoy this book as much as they thought they would. Maybe we had high expectations as it had been made into a film. A lot of us were very disappointed in the ending of the book, it all came as a bit of a shock that we weren't very happy with. It's pretty tricky to talk about the end of the book without giving away a massive plot twist but you will know once you've read it why we weren't pleased.
We discussed the two main characters and why we thought they behaved the way they did. We decided that Dex wasn't deliberately nasty, he just didn't know how to think of others before himself as this wasn't something his mother had taught him. She had taught him to be her little prince so he thought he could do no wrong and didn't appreciate it when he was told he was doing things wrong. His way of dealing with feeling bad in anyway was to go completely off the rails until someone picked up the pieces. Emma was someone who seemed to enjoy being a matyr, doing a job she didn't enjoy and picking up the pieces when a broken Dex came to her. Emma even seemed to enjoy keeping herself looking dull and unattractiveand having very few relationships with men much like a nun! One thing we didn't quite understand was how the two remained such strong friends after only having met on the last day of university term. It was put forward that maybe they remained friends because they didn't get a "moment" during their first encounter so they had that as an extra frisson to the normal friendly relationship. Another interesting suggestion was that they were using each other as a back-up plan in case they turned out to be lonely and unmarried in their old age.
The main bulk of out discussion was around whether men and women can be friends in a platonic sense without anything sexual going on in either ones minds. Luckily we have a man in our group so we could get the story from both sides with some interesting discussion going on. We also wondered whether the same thing happens to homosexuals as with heterosexuals in terms of being friends with someone of the sex that you would generally fall for. We thought that people may behave differently if they're trying to be friends with someone rather than trying to become their partner. We came to the conclusion that sometimes men and women can be friends but it does often happen that things progress beyond the platonic.
We found it interesting to see how Dex and Emma changed their wants out of life from their highly idiological ideas of life after university on their last day at university to the last few entries where they were 30 year olds.
Overall we gave this book 5 out of 10.
Many of the bookclub members didn't enjoy this book as much as they thought they would. Maybe we had high expectations as it had been made into a film. A lot of us were very disappointed in the ending of the book, it all came as a bit of a shock that we weren't very happy with. It's pretty tricky to talk about the end of the book without giving away a massive plot twist but you will know once you've read it why we weren't pleased.
We discussed the two main characters and why we thought they behaved the way they did. We decided that Dex wasn't deliberately nasty, he just didn't know how to think of others before himself as this wasn't something his mother had taught him. She had taught him to be her little prince so he thought he could do no wrong and didn't appreciate it when he was told he was doing things wrong. His way of dealing with feeling bad in anyway was to go completely off the rails until someone picked up the pieces. Emma was someone who seemed to enjoy being a matyr, doing a job she didn't enjoy and picking up the pieces when a broken Dex came to her. Emma even seemed to enjoy keeping herself looking dull and unattractiveand having very few relationships with men much like a nun! One thing we didn't quite understand was how the two remained such strong friends after only having met on the last day of university term. It was put forward that maybe they remained friends because they didn't get a "moment" during their first encounter so they had that as an extra frisson to the normal friendly relationship. Another interesting suggestion was that they were using each other as a back-up plan in case they turned out to be lonely and unmarried in their old age.
The main bulk of out discussion was around whether men and women can be friends in a platonic sense without anything sexual going on in either ones minds. Luckily we have a man in our group so we could get the story from both sides with some interesting discussion going on. We also wondered whether the same thing happens to homosexuals as with heterosexuals in terms of being friends with someone of the sex that you would generally fall for. We thought that people may behave differently if they're trying to be friends with someone rather than trying to become their partner. We came to the conclusion that sometimes men and women can be friends but it does often happen that things progress beyond the platonic.
We found it interesting to see how Dex and Emma changed their wants out of life from their highly idiological ideas of life after university on their last day at university to the last few entries where they were 30 year olds.
Overall we gave this book 5 out of 10.
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