Hotel du Lac / Convenience Store Woman
On a very warm day we met to talk about Underland. There were some quite varied viewpoints on this book, but overall people were interested in the subject matter and it led to a lively discussion.
Our next meeting will be on Aug 4th, and due to a draw between 2 short books in the voting we decided to go for a double bill. You can read either or both (or even – controversially – neither) and we’ll try and figure out the chaos on the night. So the 2 books are Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Both of these deal with the expectations of women’s behaviour so perhaps there will be some parallels we can draw.

Other books pitched were:
Crash – J G Ballard
My Fourth Time, We Drowned – Sally Hayden
Homeland Elegies – Ayad Akhtar
My Phantoms – Gwendoline Riley
House of Glass – Hadley Freeman
We’ll be meeting at Effra Social as usual, and anyone is welcome to come along. It looks like we can’t have the Churchill Room this month, so will be in the main room or outside. Just look for the people with the books. We usually meet any time from 7.30 and start book talk around 8.
Remember we are also reading Bonfire of the Vanities as our current long read – we’ll probably try and set a date in September to discuss this.