Present and Present!

I haven't blogged on books since January - I have had my own drama and there is no apology!

I attended my bookclub in February and was there but in 'screensaver' mode - not fully engaged but looking like I was. In March we met and had a surprise visitor - no not the Sunday Times columnist who poked fun at our themed evenings, but one of our precious 'old' members who now resides in the big city where folk are far too sophisticated for their own good! We laughed .....and laughed....and then some more. We also discussed that none of us are getting younger and at some date in the near future hair nets and facial hair may be a problem. Their was a consensus that hair nets will not be worn to book club - unless the theme is old age! A clever strategy has been devised so that members can let one another know that they need to visit the salon - a bookmark in the shape of a moustache is to be designed and discreetly left in your book. The thought of receiving such a book mark has sent me scurrying into Clicks to purchase a 10x magnifying mirror!

Books that are getting the thumbs up are:-

The Housemaids Daughter by Barbara Mutch.

 Love and Duty collide in Cradock during the apartheid years in a beautifully told story reminiscent of The Help.Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa and marry the fiance she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a harsh landscape, she finds solace in her diary and the friendship of her housemaid's daughter, Ada. Cathleen recognises in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own husband and daughter. Under Cathleen's tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist, and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide.

When Ada is compromised and finds she is expecting a mixed-race child, she flees her home, determined to spare Cathleen the knowledge of her betrayal, and the disgrace that would descend upon the family. Scorned within her own community, Ada is forced to carve a life for herself, her child, and her music. But Cathleen still believes in Ada, and risks the constraints of apartheid to search for her and persuade her to return with her daughter. Beyond the cruelty, there is love, hope and forgiveness.

 

Feildwork by Mischa Berlinski

 

Set in Thailand, this is a brilliantly original and page-turning first novel of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and one obsessed young American reporter. When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa goes along for the ride, planning only to enjoy himself as much as possible. But when he hears about the suicide of a young woman, Martiya van der Leun, in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder, what begins as mild curiosity becomes an obsession. It is clear that Martiya was guilty, but what was it that led her to kill? this book is very much in demand and I have bought a Kindle copy as I know that I will wait ages otherwise for it.

 

Gone Girl by Gillain Flynn is getting great reviews at book club and elsewhere. 

 

 An utterly gripping thriller (EMERALD STREET )

Gone Girl should be the big poolside read this year. Fresh out om paperback, it's a page-turning abduction mystery with an awful lot of twists. (MAIL ON SUNDAY )

A tautly written thriller about the unravelling of a marriage that is deservedly topping the bestseller charts. (THE OBSERVER )

The story of a husband searching for his vanished wife has everything - psychological acuity, humour, an unflagging pace and more twists than you could hope for in your most serpentine dreams...a sumptuous, satisfying read. (STYLIST )

The story-telling is incredibly compelling, with the cunning opening mystery soon turning down unpredictable routes, while the characters are superbly believable. No wonder it's the book that everyone seems to be reading. (Boyd Hilton HEAT MAGAZINE )

If you haven't yet caught up with this word-of-mouth bestseller - about a woman's mysterious disappearance and the secrets she and her husband are keeping - get hold of it soon. It really does live up to the hype. (WOMAN MAGAZINE )

 

My turn to buy books this month and I was spoilt for choice - Read my selections next week.

 

 

Kindle Bargains

There are many great advantages to having a Kindle from carrying a ton of books whilst travelling by air to being able to buy a book while lounging at the side of your swimming pool, but one of the best reasons for converting to an e-reader for me has been the affordability of reading material. There are some great bargains on offer at Amazon. One of my latest purchases was China Bird by Bryony Doran.

It tells the story of Edward, a sad and solitary man in his late middle-aged, twisted-spined and hump-backed, a loner who works in the archive basement of the library, lodges with Mrs Ingrams who makes his tea and ruins his laundry, and hoards letters from his mother. Like many an unmarried man with an aging, widowed mother, Edward finds his relationship with Rachel, his mother, somewhat strained. Unlike many of those men, his relationship was always that way. Rachel, the mother in question, is not a particularly unhappy widow. The best she can say of her late husband is that he was a good man. Rachel has had  a secret life as a life model for an Art College and holds a dark family secret. Then there is  the novel's main female character, Angela. Young, beautiful and studying art with true passion, she is hugely talented. In Edward, Angela finds her muse. Fascinated by his deformity and his solitary journey in life, Angela persuades Edward to pose for her as she prepares for her masters portfolio and she expects him to pose nude. As the work progresses, Edward awakens from years of suppressed emotion and apathy and begins to take an interest in the world around him, in his own being, and – naturally – in Angela. Their relationship is the prime focus of the novel, as it develops along a tightrope of understanding, empathy, misunderstanding, love, repulsion, attraction and confusion. It is a delicate novel - not over-emotional it hovers and quietly insists that you turn just one more page.
All of this cost me just 99p!!! It was one of Amazon's daily Kindle deals and the book kept me spellbound for its duration. I shall be enjoying more of her work int he future I'm sure.

Pure Poetry!

A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests.

A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love...

A year unlike any other he has lived.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.
At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

 

A strange topic for a book but I have so enjoyed reading this historical novel by Andrew Miller. Pure fiction - I can see why it won the Costa Book of the Year (2011)

 

Librarian Skills required!

A little chaos is a good thing but when it comes to bookclub we like things to be organised. This month the books were a mess because it seems that last month we forgot to record who had what and adopted a lottery system. I now fully understand the important role that librarians play in the world of books and also why SILENCE is necessary among those neat shelves and why books are catalogued and not arranged by the colour of the cover! I suspect that much of our chaos this month was because of all the chatting last month and not paying ATTENTION. 
Library Science is a mysterious qualification and I have wondered just what there is to study about being a librarian that would take two or three years - YAWN!  I am sure there is lots about being a librarian that we do not know!
As a child I loved my local library where books took me to a world outside of  our small village and where I discovered the size and scale of just how big that world is. Aged 6 or 7, the furthest I had been was Blackpool, and when I read that it was in the same county as St Helens, I almost fell of my library chair with surprise when I realised just how big the immense country of England must be .......the size of the world was just too big for me to even contemplate! Laughable when we consider the world now a Global Village.
I visited the library every week - sometimes twice and often couldn't wait to get home before I starting reading the books I had borrowed, stopping to sit on a garden wall to enjoy or the bus stop bench. On a recent visit back to the UK and returning my Auntie Gladys's books, I was thrilled to see that libraries there are still busy and well used spaces where people go to read the papers and check the community notice boards. I never visit the library here in SA - apart from the university one - the municipal ones are too depressing! If you want to find some interesting libraries click here.
Back to bookclub! Our new books this month are:-
Sweet tooth by Ian McEwan:

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere. Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a 'secret mission' which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one. McEwan's mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.

The Seamstress by Maria Duenas
Spain, 1936 and the brink of civil war.Young, poor Sira Quiroga is swept up in a whirlwind romance with her wily love Ramiro. Fleeing Madrid together for Morocco, her love blinds her to his real failings. Soon abandoned, left penniless and in debt to the authorities, she has to rely on the one skill she still possesses: sewing.Taken under the wing of the bullish but caring housekeeper Candelaria, Sira is able to sew for the glamorous foreign English and German women in Tetouan. Privy to their unbridled gossip, Sira becomes invaluable to the British secret service, a position that is filled with untold risk. A story of danger, espionage, romance and war, The Seamstress is a WWII tale like no other.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot – authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist. Meanwhile her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing – that he and Madeleine are destined to be together.
But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.

The forth title remains a mystery because I didn't study library science and nor can I read my own writing! Oh Dear!!!

 

So many lovely books - So little time!

Well another month gone by and bookclub come and gone! Another evening of sharing and caring! A love of books unites us but our bookclub has  been together a long time - One member, Judy M, can affirm that Shakespeare's Sisters has been together for over 34 years although she has only been a member for about around 30. On her 25th bookclub anniversary - her membership was celebrated with a Silver Jubilee Bookclub, champagne, a tiara  and a special cake! We do have a sense of royal occasion. Sheila is in second place and I have been a member for 15 years and am considered one of the 'new comers'.
You can't meet monthly for all that time and not feel bonded to the sisterhood! We have been through motherhood (Jacqui's youngest was born while she was a member); marriage (my very first bookclub was a sort of kitchen tea for Marion - who was about to be married and now lives in Hagga Hagga); milestone birthday celebrations; travel experiences; empty nest syndrome as our kids left for varsity and distant shores; menopause and mad husbands (is there a connection?) and the sad loss of parents. All that life has thrown at us has been shared, not in a complaining way but in a caring and supportive way. BookClub is viewed as a 'night off' from family, responsibility and life's lessons and there is an unspoken agreement that moaning is banned.
Sometimes the conversations can be a little strange though and cause much hilarity. I will give you a couple of examples of actual conversation this week:
 "My husband keeps popping out!" "My daughter pops out all the time - she's hyper mobile." 
"My husband is semi retired now - he is making dumb valets for everyone and there is one in every room."
"We were in a restaurant last week and this couple were eating one another - licking one another."
"Did the restaurant have a liquor license then?"
"I am not sure who sent the message - it was either the man who was drunkenly devouring that woman or the hunchback with no neck. I hope it wasn't the hunchback!"

See what I mean????

However we did get around to the topic of books and currently we are enjoying, The Moment by Douglas Kennedy,Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced middle aged, American writer living a very private life in Maine . In touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The return address on the box - Dussmann - unsettles him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin - at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Readers are enjoying the descriptions of Berlin and Kennedy's masterful story telling.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown tells the story of three sisters who return to their home town in the states because their mother is ill with cancer - each sister is concealing a.  secret. I am currently reading this and it is whimsical easy read with delightfully likeable characters. What makes The Weird Sisters unique (to me, at least; I'm sure there are many novels that feature William Shakespeare but this is the first I've read) is the Shakespeare factor. The Andreas family are voracious readers and their dad is a Shakespeare professor, so it rather goes without saying that the girls lives are very much soaked into Shakespeare. They're named after Shakespeare's characters: Cordelia, Rosalind, Bianca. The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare and the girls and their dad consistently quote sentences written by the bard himself.  This all makes for an interesting read.

The PostMistress by Sarah Blake is still in demand and its a beautifully written, thought provoking novel and tells a lovely, moving and beautifully evocative story linking an American journalist  reporting in London during the Blitz and a Postmistress in a small American coastal town. Its unforgettable, insightful and compelling.

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish This humbling true story has been a real hit with bookclub -  written by a Palestinian doctor, born in a refugee camp in Gaza, and who, after his wife died, then lost 3 of his daughters when the Israelis fired into his home in the Gaza strip. His daughters died simply because they had been sleeping against "the wrong wall" that evening. Although angry and deeply grieving the death of his 3 daughters, Dr Abuelaish felt no hatred towards the Israelis who had conducted the unprovoked attacks. His live interview on Israeli television just hours after their deaths captured world attention not just on the plight of the Palestinians living in the Gaza but also astonished by the absence of calls for revenge, a call which many would have expected. Instead, he called for peace and cooperation between the 2 sides, for an understanding and acceptance of each other as individuals deserving of respect.

I will report on the new books for this month in my next post. so many lovely books so little time!!
 



Dressing Up, Dressing Down. Dressing Gowns!!

 

Comfy slippers, fluffy gowns and a teddy or two set the scene for bookclub this week when we surprised our hostess by arriving in sleepwear! We all agreed that Bookclub in our Pyjamas was a jolly good idea! We lamented that there was a time when we went out in ball gowns and not dressing gowns but warm slippers were very welcome on an August evening.

 After our usual catch up and book returning - new books purchased for the month were announced.

They were Jane Raphaely's autobiography - Unedited; As well as being the autobiography of this doyen of the Magazine industry in South Africa - this book records the political and social changes in the country as it emerged from apharteid and the experiences of women from the late 60s through to today. I am a true fan of Mrs Raphaely and started to read this when I arrived home - I had to force myself to put it down an hour later and can't wait to get stuck into it again. 

The Cats Table by Michael Ondaatje. (author of The English Patient)

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England - a 'castle that was to cross the sea'. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly 'Cat's Table' with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, 'bursting all over the place like freed mercury'. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner - his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.This book comes as a recommendation from another bookclub and promises to be a GREAT read!

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. (Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011) We are usually a bit suspect of books that have won awards but a couple of us have read this short book and we agreed it was a fascinating story.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.

Home by Toni Morrison: This is a stunning new novel, by the author of Beloved. An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home -- and himself in it -- may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. Toni Morrison's deeply moving novel reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood -- and, finally, his home.

Great eats; Great Wine; Great Company and Great Books!

 

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Must Read of 2012

'He's in a place where there's just wind and waves and light, and the intricate machinery that keeps the flame burning and the lantern turning. Always turning, always looking over its shoulder.'

 

 

This book is tipped to be the 'must read' of 2012 so I had to have for my Kindle and have started it. The review is from the Amazon site.

Tom Sherbourne is haunted by traumatic memories of his horrific experiences in World War I. He is one of the men who have returned to Australia, as so many did not. He is not physically scarred, 'but he's scarred all the same, having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then.' Now, looking to his future, he becomes a lighthouse keeper. He takes a position on remote Janus Rock, off the coast of South-Western Australia, with Point Partageuse being the nearest community on the mainland. Partageuse is a place where everyone knows everyone else, and where, after the war, 'gradually, once again lives wove together into a practical sort of fabric..', where '..Janus Rock, linked only by the store boat four times a year, dangled off the edge of the cloth like a loose button that might easily plummet to Antarctica.'
He meets local girl Isabel Graysmark whilst he is on the mainland, they correspond with each other when Tom returns to the lighthouse, and they fall in love and marry. For Isabel, the war has instilled a sense of urgency into life: 'If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted...life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.' Moving forward in time to the mid 1920s, we meet them living out on Janus Rock together, with a sadness hanging between them that they have no children, Isabel having suffered miscarriages. When a boat is washed up on the rock, they make a decision that day which will change the rest of their lives, as the couple is torn between love and desperate need, and the truth and reality of their situation.

There are some beautiful descriptions of the places, which made me want to visit the fictional Partageuse. Equally, the remote location of the lighthouse, the effects of the weather, the detail of the daily duties Tom carries out, is all conveyed well, and very convincingly, so that the reader can imagine the routine of their days, sense the isolation of the lighthouse keeper and his wife, and feel the remoteness of life on Janus Rock. The effects of the War on the community in Partageuse are movingly described, reminding us of the involvement of Australia in that conflict.
This is stunning prose and heart-wrenching storytelling for a debut writer. Through the story, the author delivers many truths about life. She highlights the best and worst sides of humans, the amount of courage, the strength of love, the severity of intense pain, the cruelty inflicted by a decision made out of Isabel's desperate longing, the remorse felt. A lovely read, it is also heartbreaking as the story unfolds and the repercussions play out. I was willing all the characters to the 'best' outcome for all of them, somehow. This story really touched me, I felt quite deeply affected by it, and I cried at the end. I loved this book. It's a great debut novel.

Something to look forward to.....