What do you think is the definining moment for the main character/person in your book? Why?

The entire story of What I Saw and How I Lied is a coming of age tale for Evie Spooner. She starts the book as an inexperienced and naïve girl, and throughout the book she enters into experiences that strip her of her innocence. Some of these experiences she willingly submits herself to, such as her budding romance with Peter Coleridge. Some, however, are forced upon her, either by Peter, her parents, or fate. She is forced to recognize that her stepfather whom she adores and admires, is not the man she accepted him to be. When he came home from the war, he started his own appliance store with money he said he got from a GI loan. She learns from Peter, however, that the two men came across a warehouse in the war that contained valuables belonging to Jews who had been sent to concentration camps. That's how he got his money.

These little losses of innocence weren't Evie's defining moments. Her defining moment came when she took all of the money Joe had gotten by selling the stolen goods and gave it to a Jewish woman the family had befriended in Palm Beach. Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were vacationing just like the Spooners were, and the two couples quickly became friends. The hotel management eventually found out that the Graysons were Jewish, and bluntly asked them to leave. Evie's reparations, while somewhat ineffective and misguided, were well-intentioned. She told Mrs. Grayson that even if she and Mr. Grayson wouldn't use the money, they doubtlessly knew people who could. Evie was trying to make up for the crime her stepfather committed against some specific Jewish people by paying different Jewish people. Not very effective, but she meant well.

How did the opening passage of the book (first paragraph up to first chapter) lead you to anticipate the ending of the book?

Judy Blundell starts her book with a chapter that can be found nearly verbatim towards the end of the book, at the climax of the action. It was like she pulled a Romeo and Juliet; she told us right off the bat exactly what was going to happen like in the beginning sonnet of Romeo and Juliet, and instead of making us put down the book because we already know the ending, it makes us want to keep reading. We know what will happen, but we still want to know how it happens. Blundell sets her story up with the heroine waking up alongside her knockout mother in a hotel room. You get the feeling that they have been staying there for a long time and something changed. Evie mentions that "We never went to the hotel dining room now. They knew who we were; they'd seen our pictures in the paper. We knew they'd be saying, Look at them eating toast -- how can they be so heartless?" which suggests that going to the dining room used to be a common occurrence for this girl and her mother. "They" saw their pictures in the paper, which means something happened to them that would have called for publicity. The characterization of the mother-daughter pair as "heartless" suggests that it was them who committed the act that earned their publicity, not that they had something done to them. All of this-along with the title-helped form my opinion that some scandal was going to occur and Evie and her mother would be a part of it.

I finished Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson and am now reading What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell.

This book is really juvenile and I probably shouldn't be reading it. Sorry! Nevertheless, it is entertaining. I've had it on my shelf for a long time, and I probably should have read it when I first got it. I would have been able to relate to the main character more (she is fifteen, and an immature fifteen at that) if I had read it earlier. I always feel bad, though, when I have books that people have given me for Christmases and birthdays and I never read them, so I felt mildly obligated.

What I Saw and How I Lied is a coming of age story about Evie Spooner. Her stepfather has returned from World War II and takes Evie and her mother on a spur of the moment trip from their New York home to Palm Beach, Florida. There, they meet Peter Coleridge, a 23 year old ex-soldier. It becomes apparent not only that Peter and Evie's stepfather Joe knew each other in the war, but that Joe really, really dislikes Peter. Drama and mystery ensues.

On Finishing "Neither Here Nor There"

At the beginning of his book, Bill Bryson never states exactly why he took this cross continental trip. He did say that he travelled across Europe as a young adult and wanted to go back to appreciate it yet again as an older man, but the first time he went with his friend, Stephen Katz. This time he did it entirely alone. Here is my question: Why would anyone want to backpack across Europe for an indefinite amount of time alone? What could be enjoyable about that? Certainly, I can understand wanting to spend an afternoon alone, a day, perhaps even a weekend. But I would never ever want to go to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language and have absolutely no one to rely on but myself. Doesn't Bill Bryson enjoy human companionship? He even left his pregnant wife at home! Why couldn't he have waited and taken this trip once she had their baby and had a lovely family vacation? I suppose it makes sense that perhaps his wife wasn't interested in traveling in an unknown land for that long, so maybe that was their compromise. He could have, however, travelled with a friend who was interested. Maybe even Katz again. Or, he could have gone and done whatever he wanted in whatever countries he wanted and then met his wife (and possibly children) in a more family and tourist friendly city. I just don't understand how he stayed sane. He couldn't even communicate with many of the locals. I just don't get it.

Who do you think is the intended audience? Why?

I think that Bill Bryson never writes for a specific group of people. I think that he knows he is funny and just wants to get as many people to read his work as possible. I mean this in the nicest way possible: I think he just likes attention. He doesn't care who reads his books as long as a large number of people read them. In this specific book, however, and actually when I think about in probably most of his books, he writes for the Baby Boomer generation. Bryson is a baby boomer, and he makes baby boomer jokes and allusions. This doesn't contradict what I said earlier: he directs some of his jokes and references to baby boomers, but they are never such that other readers won't get them. He wants everyone to enjoy his books.

The reason that I think his main audience in this book is the Baby Boomer generation is that his topic is one that many baby boomers will relate to. When he was a young adult, he backpacked through Europe, just like lots of others in his generation. Now he's writing about repeating that trip but this time as an older man. The places and experiences are probably things that other people around his age would appreciate. In addition, he tells the entire book from his perspective, obviously. He is a baby boomer. It would make sense that he wrote this book for others his age. Other baby boomers would be able to relate to his reactions to experiences, to his emotions, and to his wishes and desires on his trip, more so than young people or much older people.

Does the author seem to have a friendly, unfriendly or some other type of relationship with the content of the book? Why do you think so??

I finished The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and am now reading Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. In response to your last comment, yes, I did enjoy The Time Traveler's Wife. I don't, however, think I enjoyed it as much as everyone else I've talked to. I think maybe it got too hyped up before I read it and I expected too much. It still was really very good, though.

Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There is an account of Bryson's travels through Europe. He saw Europe when he was twenty years old, and this is his account of his return trip as an older man. As always, Bill Bryson is funny. On his relationship with the content, it completely depends on the circumstances. For example, as he is walking along the canals of Amsterdam in the early hours of the morning, his relationship with the content is very serene and satisfied. However, when he is discussing the rudeness of people in a town I don't remember the name of, his relationship with the content is less friendly and more annoyed and frustrated. He conveys his annoyances not with the perfect words, but more with the perfect absence of words. I think he has mastered the art of omitting. When he talks about a funny situation, he never talks about what made it funny, or why he thinks it is funny, he just gives the reader the information and delivers it in a way in which you have to laugh at it. For example:

"...my seatmate turned out to be an acned string bean with Buddy Holly glasses and a lineup of ballpoint pens clipped into a protective plastic case in his shirt pocket....He spent most of the flight reading Holy Scripture, moving both sets of fingertips across each line of text as he read and voicing the words just loud enough for me to hear them as a fervent whisper in my right ear. I feared the worst....Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was sitting taking stock of my two hundred cubic centimeters of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.

'Have you found Jesus?' he asked suddenly.

'Uh, no, it's a quarter," I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart."

This is funny only because Bill Bryson never tells us that it is funny. He only provides us with the background information. He doesn't even tell us what he thought about the situation, so we have to draw our own (though obvious) conclusions about his relationship with the content. It's like with stand-up comedians, their jokes are usually only funny as long as they don't laugh too.

Reading Group Guide questions from the back of the book #

Would you call The Time Traveler's Wife a comedy or a tragedy, or are such classifications relevant to a work that plays havoc with time and allows one character to appear periodically after his death?

I looked up the exact definition of comedy to make sure I could commit to an answer to this question, and of the ones I found, most said that in a comedy everything thing ends up well for the protagonist, even if it doesn't end up well for every character. Things in The Time Traveler's Wife don't end happily for the protagonists, Clare and Henry. Henry dies, and Clare is therefore sad for the rest of her life. Even though Henry visits her once after his death when Clare is an old woman, that can't change the fact that they have been apart since he was forty three. Alba's life turns out okay, I suppose, she time-travels but she has more control over her condition. She grows up without a father, however, so of courses she isn't in the best place. Based on these thoughts, I decided that The Time Traveler's Wife can't be a comedy. I looked up the definition of tragedy, and it is:

a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

The book itself isn't exactly "serious or somber", but it does in fact deal with "serious and somber" themes of loss. Henry would probably be described by some as being "a great person." I would definitely call Henry's time-traveling ability "a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate" and this did lead to his downfall. Therefore, The Time Traveler's Wife is a tragedy.