Lissa’s Comments (group member since Jul 12, 2011)

Lissa’s comments from the Topeka & Shawnee Co. Public Library group.

I read the first 25 pages of "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline out loud to my spouse on a road trip this weekend. It is AWESOME -- geeky and funny and set in a sort of believable future 2045? in which all of the climate change and poverty and other predictions have happened and most people spend part of each day in a virtual reality. There is a huge treasure hunt, and a lot of 80's pop culture references, and I am hoping that my spouse agrees that we should just each read the book on our own without waiting for the other person, because I really want to see what happens next.

We weren't worried about being offended -- at least not in Angle of Repose and How Green Was My Valley -- both times the issue was whether or not the female character had actually had sex with the other man or whether they were just holding hands and talking....It definintely made a difference to each of us in our interpretation of the book, the plot and how we judged the character, but the author left it up to us to decide for sure in both books! Drove us all crazy, but gave us lots to talk about!

For the second month in a row, the most pressing question at book group that everyone wanted to discuss was whether the main characters actually had sex or were just "talking".....
Both months, most of us agreed that there was probably something more going on than was explicitly described....
what do you think? and whether or not you enjoy reading explicit sex scenes, how do you react when the author is so vague that you can't even tell for sure what has happened?

What do you think of Stegner's narrative technique? He uses a contemporary historian to tell Susan Ward's story. Is Lyman Ward a reliable narrator? How would this novel be different if Lyman's own story were excluded? And since Susan Ward's letters are based directly on Mary Foote's real letters, does that change your perception of his narrative choices?