Could there possibly be a worse way to read this book than as a selection for a book group? I doubt it. It has to be read by a certain date; you have an implicit obligation to at least attempt it as a ‘good’ bookgroup member; it’s a book that someone else has chosen in their time, and not yours.
And in my case, it’s by Caroline Jones to whom I developed a deep antipathy after reading her book Through a Glass Darkly (you can see my snarky review here). I can hear her rounded vowels and caramel tones in my head, see her slightly tilted head, and so bloody earnest. She annoys me so much.
It’s odd, because under different circumstances (and that’s the crucial thing) I would probably quite enjoy this book. I am drawn to a spiritual life; my identity as a Unitarian Universalist is important to me; in fact, I spend Sunday mornings a couple of times a month exploring exactly the things that she does in this book.
But that’s on my terms: I can ‘think myself’ into a spiritual mindset before even embarking on thinking about things of the spirit; it’s a commitment that I have made with myself, by myself. It’s not a reading assignment I have to have completed by a certain date, like homework. All of this book feels like hard work. It was because I knew that 300 pages with Caroline was going to be so tedious that I actually started reading the book a fortnight before our bookgroup meeting, instead of my usual practice of starting three nights before the meeting and finishing the book at some ungodly hour on the Thursday morning before the meeting on Thursday afternoon. I knew that one chapter at a time of this book would be as much as I could handle, and I was right. I feel as if I have been harangued and bible-bashed for 300 pages.
So, wrong book, wrong author, wrong mode of reading it.
My rating: 4/10
Read because: CAE bookgroup choice.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 