The TSR Wordery book club - 5x free books to review each month!

I'm expressing my interest again because this is totally up my street.
I like something a bit quirky and unusual, I'll be reading some of my required reading for uni which can be a bit heavy and, less be honest dull (Ulysses is gonna be fun), so something vastly different would be a relief. I've heard good things about books like 'Elizabeth is Missing', 'We are All Completely beside Ourselves', 'The Bees' and 'The Paying Guests'. Basically those 'cool' modern reads that get nominated for the Booker Prize and such and are something unique and amazing and make you feel things.

May's Book - The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The review is from CongressTart:

I have mixed feelings about this book. While Ishiguro is an excellent writer as always, there were a few things that I probably would have changed, which I shall get to later.

The Buried Giant is a strange little novel. Our protagonists are Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple who have set out on a journey to find their son, and get caught up in a quest to slay a dragon along the way. If there's one thing that Ishiguro succeeds at with this novel, it's evoking atmosphere. There is a general sense of confusion and haziness all the way throughout. In a novel where a mysterious fog is causing people to lose their memories and where the legacy of war is constantly hanging over the characters, this is rather important and definitely something that adds to the novel as a whole. The book also has a very intimate feel to it, both in its setting and in the ways in which the characters interact with one another. At times this leads to some very tender moments, which succeeded at drawing me in. In this case, I felt that the first fifty or so pages were pretty much perfect. This is how I'd hoped that the rest of the novel would be, with Axl and Beatrice fighting against the fog, encountering new people along the way, and wrestling with the remaining memories they had of one another, both good and bad.

However, once I got to the subplot with the dragon, this is where I started to lose interest. Unfortunately at this point the narrative starts to become rather slow and repetitive, and I found myself struggling to pay attention. I also realised just how bland Axl and Beatrice were once the plot got going. Personality wise there just isn't much to them. In another kind of story this might not be such a problem, but in a fantasy driven novel, and especially a quest narrative, it's very important that the reader is fully invested with what is going on, and if I'm honest, I don't think I was fully invested with this story.

Nevertheless, I would still recommend this book to fans of Ishiguro. He tackles the novel's themes with nuance and grace, and there is enough mystery to push you through to the end. However, this is far from one of the best novel's I've read this year, and I probably wouldn't read it again.

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I'm interested again

I just finished reading last month's book (The Versions of Us) if you'd like a review from someone who didn't receive the book but had a copy anyway?