The Club: A Reese's Book Club Pick

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Really, really enjoyed Professor Damrosch's tour and company. As a now-budding 18C dilletante, I say that this is the perfect book to accompany any reading of Boswell's justly celebrated The Life of Samuel Johnson. Edit: I forgot to mention one other thing I really liked, and one I didn't: the author is very good at bringing the women in Johnson's life into the mix, as Boswell pretty much leaves them out, especially Johnson's guide star Mrs. Thrale, who had little patience for Boswell's many personal failings. So that was really good. I was hoping to get much more on Oliver Goldsmith, though, and he doesn't even rate his own chapter, which is a shame, as Johnson esteeemed him highly and from what little I have read about him here and in LoJ, he seems a very interesting character.] Alice moves to a small town and presents the idea of starting a book club with a group of friends, presumably to get to know them better and fit in. But the truth of the matter is… she wants revenge. Ellery Lloyd is a husband and wife writing team who is often noted for their prior work in People Like Her. The Club, however, was not funny like People Like Her. It was really dark, and it could have used some humor to lighten it up. There were some times at the beginning of the story where I found it difficult to figure out who’s storyline we were reading but after a while I got to know the characters and the way the chapters were written around them.

The fact that Alice was suspected early on dismissed all the ‘C’mon you must know’ and made the ‘proving it’ even better The choice of a tavern as the meeting place was easy: taverns were the social centers of male life in the 18th century—and The Club was decidedly all male. Johnson described a chair at a tavern as "the throne of human felicity." And so the Turk's Head Tavern became the meeting place every Friday until 1783, when it closed and the venue changed to Prince's Tavern. Damrosch's history focuses on The Club's first twenty years but it existed until "at least" 1969. We learn a lot about the friends Tom, Maggie and Rebecca, one by one their secrets are revealed, and you become invested in their stories, however there is never any follow through. Once the secret is revealed the author just moves on with little regard to the fallout. As tempers fray and behavior worsens, as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Island Home’s members will begin to wish they’d never made the guest list.But in some ways they were psychological twins. Both suffered long periods of melancholia, a deep clinical depression that, at the time, was attributed to incorrectly observing the external environment rather than to internal neurological chaos. Both feared madness, and both delighted in the repartee, arguments, and mutual learning that was the heart of the Club for its twenty years of life.

The most spectacular of all is Island Home—a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort, just off the English coast—and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade. The second half is much better than the first and some things you learn pull you up sharply and make you reevaluate what you think you know. There are some excellent, dramatic and almost surreal scenes towards the end and a couple of those are doozies! I like the end-justice served.I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed. In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” But as the first guests arrive, the weekend soon proves deadly – because it turns out that even the most beautiful people can keep the ugliest secrets and, in a world where reputation is everything, they’ll do anything to keep them… Simon Vance, the narrator, has a very pleasant voice and he handles Scottish, Irish, and American accents adroitly. I particularly liked the regional accent he used for Dr. Johnson's voice.