December Meeting

This month we celebrated Christmas at Lisa's and all admired her new kitchen - very posh.  We also had nibbles and a lovely goodie bag from Lisa filled with sweeties.  We then got onto the business of discussing 'Major Pettigrew's Last Stand' by Helen Simonson. 

I think we all generally liked this book, I loved the language and imagery used throughout, I could really picture the scenes and we all thought it could be easily turned into a film.  The characters were on the whole quite stereotyped, a bumbling old man, the Asian lady oppressed by her family, a greedy son etc.  The story was lovely, a real feed good tale with a suitablly happy ending although we thought the cliff scene a little over the top but necessary for the gun story line.

Result: 7/10 (again I forgot to take a vote, so I've made this up based on our discussion)

Our next book was on a horror theme, we chose from the following:

• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
• Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews
• Watchers by Dean Coontz
• The Best Short Storied of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
• Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
• House of the Hanged by Mark Mills
• Dracula by Bram Stoker

We chose 'Rosemary's Baby' by Ira Levin which we'll be reading for the February meeting.

Our next meeting will be back at the Warwick Arms on Wednesday 11th January 8pm.

November Meeting

This month's meeting was at Jen's house, and we'll be having lots more meetings at her house if the snack were anything to go by ...

These are cakey pops, cake mixed with buttercream and coated in chocolate and they are yummy.   The green rectangles on top of the pops on the right are actually books which are really detailed, see more of Jen's work at her website CakeyPigg.

Anyway, back to the books.  We discussed 'The Small Hand' by Susan Hill, a short, spooky book about a ghost child who links to a mysterious past.  The general consensus was that this book was either too short or too long.  For a proper length novel the characters could have been developed more, especially the strange old lady or for a short, short story a lot of the story could have been culled including the unnecessary book buying stuff.  I forgot to get a mark out of 10, so I'm guessing ...

Result: 5/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Bed by David Whitehouse
• The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
• Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
• The Interogative Mood by Padgett Powell
• Bangkok Eight by John Burdett

We chose 'Bed' by David Whitehouse which we will be reading for the January meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Lisa's house (in her new kitchen) on Wed 14th December.

We decided that our next theme will be horror, so please bring some reviews of horror books which we will read for the February meeting.

October Meeting

This month we were self-evicted from the Warwick Arms as it was too busy, instead we chose the nearby Copa Bar which was a lot quieter.  We discussed this month's book, 'Alias Grace' by Margaret Atwood.  This almost unanimously loved this book, the almost-true story of a teenage murderer in nineteenth century Canada was gripping and made this book an easy read. 

The characters were very well written and posed some interesting questions.  We definately thought that Grace killed Nancy, we didn't believe her narrative and thought she portrayed herself as more innocent and gentile than she actually was.  Some of us thought that 'Mary' was her true personality and we didn't believe the hypnotism scene.  Atwood has delivered again an all enveloping world, totally different to her other books but excellent all the same.

Result: 8/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Girl Reading by Katie Ward
• An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray
• Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
• Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson
• There But For The by Ali Smith
• A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

We chose 'There But For The' by Ali Smith which we will be reading for the December meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Jen's house on Wednesday 9th November.

September Meeting

This month we met at Rachel's where we ate far too many biscuits and discussed 'A Town Like Alice' by Nevil Shute.  In short, we loved it!  We chose this from the BBC's Big Read top 100 and it certainly deserves to be in the top 100.  We loved the language which really spoke of the 1950's era, how women couldn't be trusted with money until they're at least 45 - you couldn't get away with that nowadays. 

We felt the book had two definite halves, the first being the war story which was very evocative and beautifully written and the last half being of them meeting up again and building up the town.  Most of us preferred the first half and felt the book could have ended when they met again, but I liked the story of the small town booming, although it was rather twee and she had incredibly good luck.  In short, it was very much of it's time and showed that women could be clever and resourceful, even in the 1950's.

Result: 8/10 (I made that up as I forgot to get people to vote)

We chose our next book from the following:

• The Small Hand by Susan Hill
• Killing Floor by Lee Child
• The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

We voted for 'The Small Hand' by Susan Hill which we will be reading for the November meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Jen's house on Wednesday 12th of October.

August Meeting

This month we discussed 'When God was a Rabbit' by Sarah Winman, a story of two halves told by a small girl and then her older self.  We each found the two halves of the book very different and not necessarily in a good way.  The first half was reminiscient of our own childhoods but quite idealistic, the second half we found too contrived and two dimensional.  We thought the characters were quite sterotyped and found the plot hard to believe at times.  A disappointing read.

Result: 6/10

We chose our next book from a huge list of two:

• Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

We voted for 'Alias Grace' by Margaret Atwood which we will be reading for the October meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Rachel's house on Wednesday 14th September.

July Meeting

This month we discussed 'Smut' by Alan Bennett at my house with lots of biscuits :-)  It was a short book comprising of two stories of seemingly normal surburban lives with quite a lot of smutty business.  The narative really draws you in, not a word was spared, the characters were really well developed and most of us read each story in one sitting which is testament to how easy they were to get involved with.  The every day language and wonderful terms brought the characters alive and we really identified with them.

Result: 9/10

We chose our next book from the BBCs Big Read list, a list of 100 books nominated by the nation.  We went through the list and found several which none of us had read, out of these we chose a few which we liked the sound of:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
• The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
• The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

We voted for 'A Town Like Alice' by Nevil Shute which we will be reading for the September meeting.

Our next meeting will be at the Warwick Arms on Wednesday 10th August.

June Meeting

This month we discussed 'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas, a book which we all expected to raise ethical questions about if we should hit our children.  This was not the case, the book was more about Australian multi-culturism than about slapping kids.  We didn't like this book much, we disliked the characters (most had awful character flaws) apart from Richie who we thought was actually based on the author and that's why he was OK.  We didn't relate to anything in the story, maybe because we are not Australian, but the book portrayed everyone as either an alcoholic, takes too many drugs or has lots and lots of sex.  The different ethnic characters; Greek and Aboriginal, were quite streotyped too.  The Greeks were very mysogenistic and the Aboriginals drunkered (although the character was a reformed drunk, he was still a drunk at some point).  All in all, a disappointing read.

Result: 1/10 (and we debated that for a while)

We chose our next book from the following:

• The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney
• After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell
• One Day - David Nicholls
• Stones into Schools - Greg Mortenson
• Even Silence Has An End - Ingrid Betancourt
• Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart
• When God Was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman

We voted for 'When God was a Rabbit' by Sarah Winman, which we will be reading for the August meeting.

Our next meeting will be at my house on Wednesday 13th July at 8pm, I'll send out directions nearer the time.

May Meeting

A farewell meeting to one of our founding members, Gail, who is moving to London to a fab new job.  To remind her of what she's leaving behind we had a 'Reading' themed meeting, filled with beer and biscuits.  We have also welcomed two new members over the past 2 months, Dave and Ruth - welcome and I hope you enjoy our meetings.

We also discussed this month's book 'So You Think You Know About Britian' by Danny Dorling.  A book packed with facts about Britain and interesting statistics.  A few of us didn't finish and felt it was a phd thesis crammed into a book, but others really enjoyed it using the facts in conversations and to spark debates.  An usual choice which provided lots of discussion.

Result: 6/10

We chose our book from the following:

• The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany
• A Dark-Adapted Eye - Barbara Vine
• Perfume - Patrick Suskind
• The Boy with the Top-Knot - Sathnam Sanghera
• The Distant Hours - Kate Morton
• Smut - Alan Bennett
• The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
• The Left Hand of God - Paul Hoffman

We voted for 'Smut' by Alan Bennett, it's not out in paperback until 2012 so it's dependant on our members if we read this in hardback or not.  I'm waiting to hear back from everyone and will update you soon.  If we don't read it, our second choice is 'The Yacoubian Building' by Alaa Al Aswany.

Our next meeting will be at the Warwick Arms on Wednesday 8th June, 8pm.

February Meeting

A very enjoyable evening at Lisa's saw us put the world to rights in relation to 'Her Fearful Symmetry' by Audrey Niffenegger.  A wonderful book full of twists and turns, an unusual story of a ghost and her family set against Highgate Cemetary in London.  We all loved the characters although we found Elspeth a little odd, we knew she was supposed to be 'not nice' but didn't see any evidence of this until near the end of the story.  Lots to talk about and we all agreed it was a really good read.

Result: 10/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• The Jane Austen Book Club - Karen Jay Fowler
• The Hand That First Held Mine - Maggie O'Farrell (again :-)
• So You Think You Know About Britain - Danny Dorling
• The Case for Working with Your Hands - Matthew B. Crawford
• Nourishment - Gerard Woodward

We voted for 'So You Think You Know About Britain' by Danny Dorling but it's not out in paperback until 17th March, so instead we will go to plan B for the April book...

It was suggested that we have another theme, fairy tales.  This was inspired by 'Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales' by Angela Carter, a collection of modern fairy tales.  We will each read a traditional fairy tale (or several if you wish) then we will discuss them at the April meeting, we will also read aloud some of the modern fairy tales - compare and contract etc ...

Our next meeting will be at Rachel's on Wednesday 9th March at the new time of 8pm.  This will be our 2nd birthday so we will be having cake and nibbles.

January Meeting

After some misunderstandings we missed the usual meeting and moved it to a week later.  We met last week to discuss 'Room' by Emma Donoghue, an eerie story told from the point of view of a 5 year-old boy who was born and raised in one room with his mother.  The book started off well, hinting at the truth so the reader isn't quite sure what is going on.  Why are they in the room?  Why does a man come in with groceries?  The sheer creativity of the mother to entertain her son was amazing, it teaches the modern world something about the imagination of children and how they don't need five million different toys, video games and TVs.  Towards the end of the book, the way the author makes sense of the world through a young child's eyes becomes a bit forced and it all seems a bit rushed.  But all in all a very thought provoking story.


We gave this 7/10.

We chose our next book from the following:

• The Hand That First Held Mine - Maggie O'Farrell
• Ours Are The Streets - Sunjeev Sahota
• The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

We voted for 'The Year of the Flood' by Margaret Atwood which we'll read for the March meeting.

Our next meeting will be at Lisa's on Wednesday 9th February.

December Meeting

Oh dear, my dedication to this blog is waning, life seems to have got in the way.  I have no excuse, sorry people.  My notes from the Christmas meeting have gone walkabouts, so I'll wing it.

We discussed 'Born on a Blue Day' by Daniel Tammet, an autobiography by an autistic man about his childhood, relationships and his record-breaking attempt at reciting pi to thousands of places.  An interesting book which explains autism clearly and savant-ism (is that a word?).  But we found the tone of the book quite bland, it went into great detail about some aspects of maths but glossed over more interesting bits like his relationship with his boyfriend.  OK, ok, I know he's autistic and it's wonderful that he's written a book but it's not fantastic and I wouldn't read anything else by the same author.  Why do I feel the need to appologise for that?

We chose our book after next, 'Her Fearful Symmetry' by Audrey Niffenegger which we'll discuss at the February meeting.

Oops, almost forgot, we voted on the book of 2010 and the results were:

1. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
2. The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas