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.

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.