Thursday, November 16, 2006

The first rule of book club...

is not to talk about book club.

I'm assuming that only applies to actual members of book club.

I've just finished this month's read. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. He is the dude that Oprah loved, and then questions arose about the truthfulness of his book, and he admitted some lies.

I thought it was a good read. I wouldn't have believed it anyway (like Go Ask Alice and Anne Frank - good reads, but obviously heavily edited). Not to mention Adrian Mole. Anyone knows if you use 5 coats of black paint, you're going to cover the sodding bells without having to use a vivid.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, I really enjoyed that book, too! Fiction or Non, I don't care - I still loved it.

stephen said...

Anne Frank? Adrian Mole is fiction. Go Ask Alice is complete fiction. Are you saying that you think the diary of Anne Frank is fiction too? I don't know how you got that impression, but the only people who seriously make that claim are Holocaust deniers, who obviously want to discredit first-hand accounts of Nazi persecution.

Her dad edited the published versions and removed bits where she complained about her fellow hideaways, and expressed sexual feelings that her family didn't need public airing. And he subsituted pseudonyms for real people's names. That's it. (See here.)

This is a world away from Frey making shit up that never happened in order to write a bestseller.

Anonymous said...

hah I knew you'd get a few people riled up with that statement!

Martha Craig said...

Or even personal logs.

And Stephen, yes I realise Anne Frank was real.