Book Club- Week 2

Participants in DCOE Book Club are currently reading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Here is the post from Week 1.

For Week 2, I realize that not everyone has kept up the pace, so I’ll try to avoid spoilers. I’m still enjoying the book and thought that this second section was a bit easier to read, so either I’m getting used to Rushdie’s writing style or the storyline is becoming easier to follow.

A couple additional comments about the first section:

- One of my coworkers said that he thought that the boatman Tai killed the European women who supposedly drowned themselves in the lake. I didn't think he actually killed them, but that he somehow prophesied the death of Aadam Aziz's German friend and then tried to make Aadam feel guilty about it.

- I accidentally skipped over one page near the birth of Baby Saleem and almost missed out on a key incident of the plot. Reading about Mary Pereira's feelings of guilt and references to her crime, I realized that I might have missed something big, so I flipped back and found the page I had skipped. Don't want to spoil anything, but something major does happen at the end of Book One. I think Padma leaves because she feels like she has been tricked, and is angry about it.


Comments on the second section:

- In case, like me, you have no idea what a tetrapod is (or think it refers to a 4-legged animal), here's some information and pictures of structural tetrapods. That part was sort of boring for me, but I've never been all that interested in business ventures.

-I thought the descriptions of the Brass Monkey setting shoes on fire were pretty funny. I also liked the mom going to the racetrack.

- You'd have to hit someone pretty hard to make them go deaf in one ear. I'm surprised that the narrator isn't more bitter about that.

- Lastly, towards the end of the section, we finally learn what Saleem's special power is. No interaction with the other midnight's children yet, but it must be coming soon.

Next assingment: Read up to the beginning of the section entitled Commander Sabarmati's Baton (p. 288 in my version) by next Thursday.