In The Dream House
As usual we had a busy January meeting with lots of new faces – welcome everyone and hope to see you again!
The Leopard was both loved and hated, and some other things in between, which made for a good discussion. I went in a little ambivalent about it but by the end liked it more than I had thought. It was of course perfect timing to read a book about the decline of a royal family, and we also avoided anyone pitching Spare as a follow up (though it may have been mentioned in passing in the later conversations of the night)
The next book will be In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.
Other pitches were:
The Three Body Problem – Liu Cixin
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Life and Lives of a She Devil – Fay Weldon
Empire of Pain – Patrick Radden Keefe
How to Survive a Plague – David France
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed – Mariana Enriquez
Look Who’s Back – Timur Vermes
Not Without Laughter – Langston Hughes
The Years – Annie Ernaux
Islands of Abandonment – Cal Flynn
We will be meeting on 9th Feb – in the pub from about 7.30 to start the discussion at 8. We are usually in the front Churchill Room of the Effra Social, but possibly in the main room if they have some other booking going on. Just look for the people with books, and check here or the blog on the night in case of last minute info.
2 other notes:
– We chose the next long read at our Christmas do. I think we may have done this after a wine or two as we chose A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powells epic 12 book series. I’ll set up a placeholder event for this soon so you can let me know if you are interested, but we won’t set a proper date for ages yet – it’ll likely be summer by the time we discuss it and we will do our best to find a date that works for all interested people (it’s usually smaller than our main group)
– we also voted on the best book we read in 2022 at the Christmas party and the winner was Wild Swans by Jung Chang. I’ll post up the full results shortly.
