Mitchel Troy book club is continuing to thrive, but we are always glad to welcome new members.
In August some of us went along to another book club held in Waterstone's bookshop, Hereford. We discussed a thriller No Time For Goodbye by Linwood Barclay.
Most of us really enjoyed the book. The Sunday Telegraph describes it as 'A genuinely mystifying puzzle with tense moments'. The writer Michael Connelly says 'It just flies off the page. It's a one-sit thriller. You sit down with this book and you won't get up until you've turned the last page'.
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We normally meet on the first Thursday of every month at 7.30pm. Our members take it in turns to host the meetings. At the next meeting we will be discussing comedy books we chose to read in the summer months.
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On the first Thursday of October we welcomed 2 new members to the book club.It was a very lively meeting, chatting about our individual choices of authors / books.One lady tried Dickens for the first time ( and maybe the last ! ).
Another member read a Martin Amis book. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini was highly recommended, as was Resistance by Owen Sheers. |
In November we are discussing Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels,a Canadian author who spoke at this year's Hay on Wye festival.
Dates for future meetings... November 5th ( if fireworks don't prevent us! ) December 3rd, January 7th.
Contact Rosey Ringer on 01600 712176 or Sheila Rowland on 01600 716284. |
My Father's House - Miranda Seymour
I really enjoyed this unusual & meaty biography: it's centred around Miranda's eccentric father & his lifelong obsession with Thrumpton, the family "seat" in Nottinghamshire - I became so interested that I checked it out on the internet! The father's total obsession with the house cruelly overshadows everything, including the well-being of his poor wife & family, who are made very unhappy.The descriptions of the post-war dilapidated conditions of the property reminded me - just a little - of Dodie Smith's gently romantic, Mitford-like "I Capture the Castle" but this is definitely a much more brutal read. The father is very manipulative and an extreme snob, although his branch of the family are in modest circumstances (he worked as a bank clerk) - however to be fair there were some distinguished aristocratic ancestors & connections - e.g. they are FitzRoys, which was of course the coded surname created for illegitimate royal offspring (William IV had quite a few I recall!) - and Byron, the poet. Towards the end of the book, the author relates how, in his late middle-age, her father's obsessive focus moved to expensive motorbikes & she reveals how it dawned on her that he probably had homosexual relationships with 2 of the younger men he encountered in the motorbike world. A brave & painful story, indeed.
Maragaret Tribbick
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Alfred & Emily - Doris Lessing
This is a book of 2 halves - the first being Lessing's imaginary biographies of her mother & father if they hadn't married one another: the message being that they would have been more personally fulfilled if they'd gone in different directions & been true to their real natures, rather than obeying convention. The writing style of the first part is spare & rather naive, and I began to feel uneasy that Lessing might be losing her magic touch. But I was glad to persevere, as the second part tells it how it really was - father suffering from shell shock after WW1 and mother increasingly hypochondriacal - and extremely domineering. The family moved to West Africa where her father thought he'd make his fortune growing maize & tobacco, although political influences ultimately prevented that. But the wonderfully warm references to Lessing's African servants, who became her true friends, & her famous descriptions of the African countryside soften & balance this other, unusual biography.
Maragaret Tribbick
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Toast - Nigel Slater
An enormous contrast to the 2 other books, although this is an autobiography. Very lightweight but basically a good read & an easy book to dip in and out of. Enjoyable nostalgic references to foods we all used to eat but have consigned to distant memory: Instant Whip - Crosse & Blackwell Salad Cream - Surprise Peas - Blue Band margarine - Bird's Trifle, etc. We are all much more cosmopolitan & sophisticated about food now (and conscious of all those additives, too...) - there are darker aspects to the book, especially the sudden death of Slater's mother when he was a small boy, his fraught relationships with his father and peculiar stepmother & his teenage bisexuality. But overall I think I prefer his cookery books, which have lots of well-written narrative as well as actual recipes.
Maragaret Tribbick |
The Return - Victoria Hislop
Described as holiday reading, this story is two stories.One is light, frivolous and not convincing; the second deadly serious, probably very well researched & profoundly shocking,being the description of one family's experiences of the Spanish Civil War.
The two narratives don't match.The terrible events in Spain - the devastation of the country & its people is degraded by the flimsiness of the English side of the story & the artificial connection between the two.
The book starts with the description of an unusual holiday taken by two women both keen to learn more about Spanish dancing, mainly flamenco.
This dancing theme & the emotions it evokes in Sonia the principal ( English ) character could be the link between the two very different cultures and is returned to many times.
Is it worth reading? Yes, just about, for the light it sheds on the terrible suffering of the family in Granada, echoing the cruelty & brutality practised by both sides in the Civil War & also the Fascist intervention from Germany & Italy.
Rachel Gwillim |
