Bar Book Club

We had our latest book club at Coopersmith Pub & Brewery on Thursday.

Beer of choice: Cask-conditioned Punjabi Pale Ale.

Book: Big Fish by Daniel Wallace. It was a great book, I thought, full of the fantastic not for its own sake but in support of the themes of the book, father-son relationships, the way we tell stories, etc. It let to some good discussions, mostly centered on the father-son theme. One scene that I especially liked involved the father having to pass through a particular town if he wanted to leave the small town where he grew up. Most people from the small town never managed to get past it, never managed to leave home...and while the specifics of it are very fantastic, that central idea seems so true to my experience growing up in a small town. And even my impression of the more suburban and urban friends from high school, actually.

We also talked a lot about the question of how much the stories are actually the stories that the father had told and how much are just the son's attempts to recreate his father's life through his own imagination.

We had quite a diverse selection for the next month and ended up going with Dead Souls by Ian Rankin.