Introducing Frances and Laura's Unread Book Club!

A little while ago Laura (my ex-housemate and best friend from uni) came for a visit and housemate reunion. During her stay she was admiring my fabulously colour-coordinated bookcase when we realised how many books we both own but haven't read. So we decided that it was time for magical blog challenge!  

It's pretty simple: we'll pick one of our unread books, read it at the same time and then each post a review of it. We'll probably do a book each month or every other month (depending on how busy we are) and there you go. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to come up with a catchy name yet so I'm just calling it “Frances & Laura’s unread book club!”

September’s book is The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.

Here is the blurb:

First published in 1962 and now considered one of the major works of twentieth-century literature, The Golden Notebook is the story of Anna Wulf, a divorced single mother and novelist, labouring against writer’s block in 1950s London. Fearful of going mad, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook records her writing life, the red her political views, the yellow notebook her emotional life and the blue everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook – the golden notebook – that holds the key to her recovery.

Bold and illuminating and indispensible, The Golden Notebook  is a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal and political identity, negotiating the trauma of emotional rejection and sexual betrayal, professional anxieties, and the tensions of friendship and family.

Which sounds good to me, but it also sounds complicated and intimidating. It sounds like a really good concept for a novel... but a novel that would be long and hard to read! I don't have very much to say about it at the moment, but I might post progress and check back to see what we thought when we post our reviews on 1st October! 

If you want to join in, just leave us a comment and we'll link to your review.