The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins *Spoiler alert*

Our 10 November meeting showed us just how good a book club can be. Our conversation was highly engaged and not only discussed The Girl on the Train but a range of other book titles that we loved, so that some members have now increased by severalfold the pile of books at home waiting to be read.

We noted that this is Paula Hawkins' first thriller and that she was writing light weight romances before this. We imagined her turning in her first draft as a first person narrative to her editor who rejected it and instructed her on turning the book into a three person narrative where the female characters - Rachel, Megan, Anna - have the say and none of the blokes get to speak (do editors really have this sort of power?).

One member was put off on the first page by the fact that the editor hadn't picked up the awkward construction: "... And all I could think about was the other shoe and the feet that fitted into them."

One member imagined the work that would have had to be done on butcher's paper on the wall with relevant dates and characters and lines threading between them about what could be said and what not; what could be known, and what not. The key to this book are the details that are left out, the lack of real connection between the characters and the apparent unreliability of the main character's narrative.

We agreed that all of the characters were pretty unlikeable and bleak. One member thought it was more than a bit of a stretch for the psychologist to have had an affair with a patient. Another, that Cathy seemed so impossibly dense about Rachel having lost her job.Some of us also found Anna's behaviour at the end of the book pretty unbelievable and the fact that a baby was born and subsequently died with so few people knowing or caring about it.

We all wanted to know the kind of person who would just move into someone's house and life and not even move the corkscrew in the drawer in the kitchen.

One of us wanted to write to a neurologist about alcoholic blackouts and whether indeed you could forget something as traumatic as domestic violence and then, strangely, remember it again later.

The book actually was pretty instructive about alcoholism. You are probably an alcoholic if you:

1. hide a bottle of wine in the gas meter box
2. throw up on your friend's carpet but are too inebriated to care about cleaning it up
3. drink first thing in the morning
4. lose your job through drunkenness
5. drink cans of gin and tonic on the train without caring who sees you
6. fail to remember anything about some random you met on the train
7. forget that your ex-husband has been violent towards (and the list goes on).

One member thought that the book was a bit prosaic and ho hum and would have preferred to have had a serial killer for real nail-biting chills. Another member said that a better book about domestic violence is The Eye of the Sheep, which is the second novel by Australian author, Sophie Laguna, and the meeting decided to add it to the book list.

The meeting realised that the book list does not have a science fiction title on it or a book from the alternative history genre.

A suggestion for a science fiction title has subsequently been made: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated into English by Ken Liu. See what you think:

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363123510/three-body-problem-asks-a-classic-sci-fi-question-in-chinese

Your summer reading is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole which is likely to galvanise opinion (always a good thing). It is supposed to be funny. The author posthumously received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for it in 1981. I suggest you also get started on Rome by Robert Hughes as it is a real doorstopper at 487 pages.

We will meet again in the first week of January if this suits everyone.

Happy reading!