March Meeting - 1 year anniversary!

It's hard to believe that it's one year ago that we all crammed into my lounge and met for the first time!  Our little book group has been going for 12 months and I'd like to say thank you to everyone who comes to the meetings, everyone on the mailing list and everyone who reads this blog.  Without you, this group wouldn't be possible, so here's to another 12 months and another 12 exciting books to read!

We met last week at Lisa's house (thanks to Lisa for hosting and for making cake).  It was a pot luck night and the theme was British desserts in honour of Ros who was leaving for a new life and job in Washington.  Everyone brought a dish and we had some scrummy food while we discussed 'The Adventures of Sherlock Homes' by Arthur Conan Doyle.  It was a selection of short stories which were originally published in the Strand magazine in the 19th century.  A few of us had read Sherlock stories before but most of us were new, we liked the shortness of the stories which made them easy to read in short bursts.  The language wasn't as flowery as I expected and I found it quite easy to read and enjoy.  We all liked this book and would read more of his stories (short ones or novels).

Result: All 7 of us liked this book.

Unfortunately the massive amounts of cake and chocolate I consumed during the evening left me unable to write down which books we chose from (sorry).  But our next book is 'The Shack' by Wm Paul Young.  One of the books we chose a few months ago has come out in paperback so we decided to read 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel for the June meeting.

We all enjoyed holding the meeting is someone's house rather than the pub so we're going to discuss doing this for all meetings at the next meeting in April.  We'll hold the next meeting (Thursday 8th April) at the usual Warwick Arms but have a think about how sharing the venues across several people's houses would affect the meetings.

Finally, as I mentioned above we've lost one of our founding members, Ros to the great US of A.  We wish her all the best in her new job and look forwards to being invited to have a special book group meeting over in Washington.  We will miss you Ros, you've provided some great discussion points (mainly who you'd slap in each book) and your sly use of colleagues to pick out book reviews so you don't have to is second to none.

January Meeting

Happy New Year!

Despite the snowy conditions in Reading, we managed to scrape together 4 of our most loyal members and had a cosy meeting in the pub.  We discussed ‘The Winter King’ by Bernard Cornwell which is a historical fiction novel based in the dark ages centering on Arthur’s time.  The story is told from the view point of a young druid, Derfel who grew up at Glastonbury under Merlin’s protection and became a great warrior beside Arthur and Galahad.  I particularly love this period in history and the magical, mystical folklore which surrounds it, so I loved this book.  Everyone else did too and we discussed the emerging Christian faith being shown alongside the traditional Pagans and how violent those times must have been and the author does describe particularly gory battle scenes.  The book takes a slightly off centre view to the more traditional Arthur/Merlin stories and shows them in a less idealistic light.  Merlin is portrayed as an absent/distracted man who seems more interested in the ‘Holy Grail’ than helping Arthur win his battles.  Lancelot is shown to be a whining, spoilt prince who spreads rumours of his battle victories rather than actually doing anything useful.  A great book and we will all be reading the final 2 books in the series.

Result: 4 of us liked this book.

We chose our next book from the following:

• Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver
• The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde

It was a draw between ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘The Big Over Easy’ and with a flip of a coin we decided on ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The next meeting will be at the usual place on Thursday 11th February.

Thanks to Lisa who arranged a lovely, snowy walk on Sunday 20th December.  We took our lives in our hands as we navigated around the icy paths of Reading.  The scenery was beautiful and many of us saw parts of Reading we didn’t know existed.  We finished on a high note in Forbury Gardens with hot mulled wine before slipping and sliding to our individual houses.  I think it would be really nice to repeat the walk in summer.