The Mother-Daughter Book Club #4—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Piranesi, and Notes on an Execution

My daughters and I enjoy reading together and this post is one in a series about the books we’ve read and what we thought about them. Here are links to the other Mother-Daughter Book Club posts—

The Mother-Daughter Book Club #1: The Fifth Child; After Dark; This is How You Lose the Time War
The Mother-Daughter Book Club #2: Klara and the Sun
The Mother-Daughter Book Club #3: Foe; I’m Thinking of Ending Things

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Evelyn and I were excited that sister Josie wanted to jump in on our book club. Josie had read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in middle school but Evelyn and I never had. We too wanted to be in the know about this classic sci-fi novel so this was the first book the three of us chose.

If you haven’t read it, the comedic story centers on the adventures of the only man to survive the destruction of Earth when it’s demolished to make way for a galactic freeway. Joining Arthur Dent on his adventures through space are traveling companions Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, Veet Voojagig, and Marvin, a depressed robot (the best character, in our opinion). As you can imagine, it’s zany as all get-out.

We could not get above 3.5 stars for this book and I apologize to all the super fans. Evie liked it the best of the three of us. She appreciated the juxtaposition of the meaninglessness of life with the meaningfulness of it. I think she used the term “positive nihilism”, philosophy major that she is.

To me it felt like a schtick, a joke gone on too long. But I get why a nerd-dom has formed around its wackiness. There’s plenty of fodder for inside jokes and I think lots of people find the dark and deadpan humor hilarious. Maybe it boils down to different senses of humor? Moving on…

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi lives in a labyrinthine house with an infinite number of rooms and endless hallways lined with vast numbers of giant statues. He has studied the tides so when the ocean brings its deadly flood crashing through the place, he knows how to survive. There is only one other person in the house, so Piranesi thinks, and they visit periodically to share “knowledge.” But nothing is really as it seems.

Evelyn and I had considered this book a while back, but we read the opening page and dismissed it. Here’s the first sentence—“When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides.” There was an entire page of this kind of surreally stuff and capitalization of random words. Neither of us was interested.

That is, not until Josie suggested we give it a try. Spurred on by a bookseller-fan at Barnes and Noble, we decided to read it. And what a good decision! We really liked this book. 4 stars all around (Josie and I elevated it to a 5 after some weeks to marinate on it.). And it did win the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which I now can understand. Extremely smart and original.

The “things are not what they seem” part of the book is what grounds it in the midst of its strangeness. This guy’s Amazon review speaks to my experience—“By the end of the first few pages I was both bored and irritated. This is NOT a “pulse-pounding page turner!” Thirty or forty pages further on I was captivated. In fact, it is difficult even to ascribe a genre to it. Then, I reached a point where I turned the pages as fast as I could…It is so refreshing to read something so different and that is so exquisitely plotted out and well written.”

Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka

I’d heard a lot of buzz about this Edgar Award-winning novel, and the fact that Kukafka is a literary agent turned novelist intrigued me. The story is told from multiple points of view, one being a serial killer on death row, and the others being the women in his life.

Evie gave this book a 5 out of 5. Ironically, it appealed to her because of her aversion to the true crime genre and the often lack of focus on the female victims. A strength of the book is the compelling perspectives of the women who’d known the killer, including his mother (my favorite parts) and the detective who solves the case. Another topic the book explores is the often fruitless question, “Why did he do it?” Plausible reasons are explored and yet they don’t add up to a completely satisfying answer. Is it nature or nurture? It’s not always clear.

The three of us agreed on a few weaknesses, including a bit of overwriting, the detective’s inexplicable withholding of info. from her superior, and descriptions of the legal process (we asked lawyers in the family and confirmed that that’s-not-how-it-goes-down.) Josie and I ended up each giving it a 4. But I liked it enough to suggest my other book club give it a read!