Review: Laughs, Thrills and Books!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2013
Look out!The evil minions are gathered in a top secret hiding place. They're here to discuss...'The Time Traveler's Wife'?That's right! The henchmen have a book club!Suddenly, the sound of bombs and gunfire fill the night. When it's all over, you can bet there's hell to pay."What were you doing? Drinking or something?""No actually, we were reading,""Reading? Jesus! What were you reading?" he asked. "Anything good?"Henchmen. Who are they really? As book club leader, Mark Jones explains, "...we're not the bad guys. We just occasionally work for them."These are the men who work for the REALLY bad guys, supervillains who have secret hideouts deep inside volcanoes. They have names like Connaughtard Cottletrophff, Zillion Silverfish, Polonius Crump, and Condoleezza Vice. They are villains armed with enough gadgets to make James Bond pop a woody. And their plans are to take over the world using "artificial month-long sandstorms" or "Defrigerators" that will melt the polar ice caps overnight. As Jones tells it, "if the masses in the major metropolitan centres knew just how many plots, plans and schemes there were to blow them up, sink them, freeze them, bury, blind or bugger them on any given week, property prices would plunge through the mantle."But what's a henchman to do with his down time? Why join a book club, or course!Among the ten rules of book club? "...you don't talk about book club. And no chick lit!"You can tell a lot about your fellow agents by their participation in book club. "We knew Captain Collett to be a reasonable man (he'd given Joseph O'Conner's 'Star of the Sea' a solid four out of five and you can't be much more reasonable than that)."This was a wonderfully funny read, packed with action, thrills, laughs and books. (I even added a few to my "to read" list.)"Our books were like windows out onto the world. Of course they had been before we'd started book club, when they'd been read individually, but when you read books as a group, the worlds and stories that are held within their pages come to life even more because they become part of a collective consciousness. The experiences become richer and that window out onto the world opens just a little wider."A great reminder that when the chips are down, nobody's got your back like your fellow readers.