Book Club: Before the Fall

This past month, our book club read Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. It's a novel about a mysterious plane crash and lives of those who were on the plane. The timeline is a little tricky to follow as there is the present (day of the crash) and then the past, but then the novel continues with the story of the two survivors and the investigation of how the plane crashed. I loved the beginning of the book. The author shares some details of one survivor's childhood and one event that I just loved -- watching Jack LaLanne swim from Alcatraz to the shore of San Francisco pulling a boat behind him while handcuffed--and how watching one man do something to impossible made him realize he could do anything if he really went for it. This idea became a theme of sorts in the book and I really liked how it was told.

Hawley works a lot in the TV/film industry and this book read like a movie (which will be a movie some day I'm told). As you read the book, each chapter focuses on one person's story although you soon find out that they are all intertwined someone and it soon gets a little muddy whose story you are actually reading.

One of the characters is a news anchor who comes off as a "bad guy" of sorts --a newsman who creates news from nothing really; creates leads from innocent comments, makes a lot of little things seem like really big things and everything is urgent and important (and stressful). I could see parallels to our current news industry and wondered if this was a core part of the book?

All in all, it was an entertaining read and fairly fast paced. The characters seemed "normal" and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary -- just a really horrific event, what led up to it and how people moved on.

This past month, our book club read Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. It's a novel about a mysterious plane crash and lives of those who were on the plane. The timeline is a little tricky to follow as there is the present (day of the crash) and then the past, but then the novel continues with the story of the two survivors and the investigation of how the plane crashed. I loved the beginning of the book. The author shares some details of one survivor's childhood and one event that I just loved -- watching Jack LaLanne swim from Alcatraz to the shore of San Francisco pulling a boat behind him while handcuffed--and how watching one man do something to impossible made him realize he could do anything if he really went for it. This idea became a theme of sorts in the book and I really liked how it was told.

Hawley works a lot in the TV/film industry and this book read like a movie (which will be a movie some day I'm told). As you read the book, each chapter focuses on one person's story although you soon find out that they are all intertwined someone and it soon gets a little muddy whose story you are actually reading.

One of the characters is a news anchor who comes off as a "bad guy" of sorts --a newsman who creates news from nothing really; creates leads from innocent comments, makes a lot of little things seem like really big things and everything is urgent and important (and stressful). I could see parallels to our current news industry and wondered if this was a core part of the book?

All in all, it was an entertaining read and fairly fast paced. The characters seemed "normal" and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary -- just a really horrific event, what led up to it and how people moved on.