Novel Reading III

Coordinator:  Judith Vernier          01246 418607

We meet in each other’s houses, a flexible, mutually agreed arrangement, on the second Friday morning of the month and adhere to this date unless there are fewer than 4 people available, (maximum group number is 10).

Our modus operandi is to have a list of future reads proposed by members and to select from that for the next two/three months ahead.  Books are not selected in any rigid order – it depends on a mutual agreement as to whose turn it is to lead the discussion, how a particular book might contrast with a previous read and whether we feel up to a ‘long read’ – perhaps over Christmas (as we meet to eat in December).  We have continued reading an occasional biography and, having enjoyed Clare Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy, we followed up with The Invisible Woman, her account of the life of Dicken’s mistress.  Catherine Bailey’s Black Diamonds is not only about the Fitzwilliam family of Wentworth Woodhouse but also an excellent social history of coalmining in the 20th century. 

We started 2010 with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, a classic regarded as a ‘slow’ read because of the style but which provoked comparisons with modern parenting and teaching methods.  We have read two of Robert Harris’ novels, Ghost, agreed to be a page turner, and Imperium, set in ancient Rome.  A first novel by Poppy Adams, The Behaviour of Moths, we thought showed promise and greatly increased our knowledge of its title subject matter.  A recent Booker winner, Colm Toĩbin’s Brooklyn, made us wonder why it had been chosen as did an earlier winner of the same prize, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore but, after sharing our impressions with each other, we agreed that both showed an economy in the writing and characters were brought to life with minimal description. October saw us reading Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void and Andy Cave’s Learning to Breathe which gave some comparison between an account of one terrifying episode and the lifestory of a climber, both of which demonstrated the almost incomprehensible (to us) urge to tackle mountain peaks and suffer extremes to achieve the summit.  Our understanding of the technicalities of climbing were greatly enhanced when we discovered one of our number was a climber!  November’s meeting in National Short Story Week gave us another opportunity to experiment by each bringing a collection of short stories and talking about them.  This turned out to be a fascinating exercise as writers ranged from Flaubert and Thomas Hardy to Maeve Binchy and Kate Atkinson and two of the group who started out resolutely ‘anti short stories’, may even have been converted – a little – to the genre.

Our current suggested future reads list includes some authors without a specific work designated.

Half of a Yellow Sun                                                  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie             
The Night Watch/The Little Stranger                       Sara Waters                                        
Lovely Bones                                                             Alice Sebold                                      
                                                                                    Henning Mankel
                                                                                    Dorothy Whipple                               
Even the Dogs                                                          Jon McGregor
The Boy in Striped Pyjamas                                    John Boyne
The Change of Altitude                                            Anita Shreve                                      
Notes from an Exhibition                                          Patrick Gale                                       

2011 starts with The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher.