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Unfortunately I won't be able to join you this week - it's my last week on placement so frantically trying to get my portfolio finished for Friday! Have a lovely evening. Alex

Hi everyone, Sorry, completely forgot I said I'd put something on here! Yep, a few of us met last month and as Alec said, none of us had actually finished the book - I'm pretty sure it was the first time that had happened in the four years I've been going to the group! We voted for Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith as our April read. I finished my list of crime novels late so didn't have time to post it up here - apologies to those who weren't there and didn't get to vote but I've posted it below for those who are interested. We didn't set a date for the next meeting - we were toying with the 15th or the 22nd and I was going to post a message up here to see whether there was a general consensus. However, as many of you won't have been able to start the book yet (given that you didn't know what it was!), shall we go for the later date of 22nd April if that works for most of us? In which case: Next meeting: Tuesday 22nd April Time: 7:45 for 8:00 Place: House of Tippler Book: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith Toodles Alex Novels on the theme of dastardly deeds Despair - Vladimir Nabokov Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening ?split? in Hermann?s personality. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov takes us into a deranged world, one full of an impudent, startling humour, dominated by an egotistical and scornful figure of a murderer who thinks himself an artist. Th?r?se Raquin - Emile Zola Zola's Th?r?se Raquin is a story of lust, madness and destruction set within the dingy backstreets of Paris. The eponymous protagonist ? a repressed and silently resentful young woman ? is married off according to her aunt's wishes to her sickly cousin Camille. When Th?r?se meets Camille's robust and earthy friend Laurent, a turbulent passion is unleashed that drives them ultimately to violence and murder. By merging elements of the gothic and tragic with a study of petit-bourgeois banality, Zola created a work of enduring fascination. Jezebel - Irene Nemirovsky In a French courtroom, the trial of a woman is taking place. Gladys Eysenach is no longer young, but she is still beautiful, elegant, cold. She is accused of shooting dead her much-younger lover. As the witnesses take the stand and the case unfolds, Gladys relives fragments of her past: her childhood, her absent father, her marriage, her turbulent relationship with her daughter, her decline, and then the final irrevocable act. With the depth of insight and pitiless compassion we have come to expect from the author of Suite Fran?aise, Irene Nemirovsky shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth The Collector - John Fowles Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time. Alone and desperate, Miranda must struggle to overcome her own prejudices and contempt if she is understand her captor, and so gain her freedom. Brighton Rock - Graham Greene A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold who is determined to avenge a death. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon?all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where ?the most interesting things happen at night.? Strangers on a Train - Patricia Highsmith Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. "Some people are better off dead," Bruno remarks, "like your wife and my father, for instance." As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith's perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder.

Hi all, We had an enjoyable evening last week chewing over Anna Karenina and the general verdict seemed to be that it was worth taking the extra month to read it. The vote for this month's book was a close run affair, but Conrad's Lord Jim won out in the end. I volunteered to do the next list, but we hadn't decided on a theme. I've had a think and given my current working environment, I'd like to use crime as the theme for the list (I can't remember whether we've had a crime list before, but I think it must have been a while ago if we did). I know that this risks reopening the debate on what constitutes 'literature' but I have some ideas for interesting avenues to explore and promise not to present you with a list of Agatha Christies in March! Let me know if you have any objections. Next Meeting: Tuesday 18th March Time: 7:45 for 8:00 Place: House of Tippler Book: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad See you all in March Alex

Hi folks, very sorry about this evening. Frantically trying to finish assignments for Friday and didn't even notice how late it had got. Hope you all had a great evening and see you in Feb Alex

Hi Gubby, We always welcome new members. In December, we chose Anna Karenina as our text and since it is pretty epic, we have given ourselves two months to read it! We are meeting socially on Tuesday (as we quite like to get together for a spot of food and wine) but will be discussing the book itself in February. We will set the date for the meeting on Tuesday and post it on here, so if you wanted to get going on the book in advance, please feel free! Best Alex

Yep, table is booked under my name for Tuesday at the usual time. See you there! Alex

The Russians are coming!!!!

Hi peeps, Afraid I won't make it tonight. Hope you all have a good evening Alex

Hiya, New members are always welcome - we're usually at the tables by the front windows at the House of Tippler. Hope to see you on the 5th! Alex

Happy Sunday everyone, Right, so the theme for next month was music and it's a slightly longer list than usual as I found myself spoilt for choice. I hope it meets with your approval... A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but the very funny novel High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This funny novel is obsessed with music; Hornby's narrator is an early-thirtysomething English guy who runs a London record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way?on vinyl?and is having a tough time making other transitions as well, specifically adulthood. The book is in one sense a love story, both sweet and interesting; most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments over arcane matters of pop music. Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that he wants to commit himself to anyone. So it's hardly surprising that his girlfriend decides that enough is enough. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede. Pepperland - Barry Wightman What happens when one revolution dies and a new one begins? She asks him?do you want to play your little rock ?n roll songs or change the world? He says?both. Pepperland is a ?70s rock and roll race through the heartland of America?a love letter to the power of new-fangled computers and the importance of a guitar pick. Pepperland is about missing information, missing people, missing guitars, paranoia, brothers, revolution, Agents of the Federal Government, IBM, Hugh Hefner, a Dark Stranger, love, death and the search for it amidst the wreckage of recession-wracked, entropically rundown mid-seventies America. The Pianist - Wladyslaw Szpilman The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Nocturne in C# Minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years in between, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man) it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. The Cellist of Sarajevo - Stephen Galloway In a city under siege, four people whose lives have been upended are ultimately reminded of what it is to be human. From his window, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbours waiting in a breadline. Then, in a flash, they are killed by a mortar attack. In an act of defiance, the man picks up his cello and decides to play at the site of the shelling for twenty-two days, honouring their memory. Elsewhere, a young man leaves home to collect drinking water for his family and, in the face of danger, must weigh the value of generosity against selfish survivalism. A third man, older, sets off in search of bread and distraction and instead runs into a long-ago friend who reminds him of the city he thought he had lost, and the man he once was. As both men are drawn into the orbit of cello music, a fourth character- a young woman, a sniper- holds the fate of the cellist in her hands. As she protects him with her life, her own army prepares to challenge the kind of person she has become. A novel of great intensity and power, and inspired by a true story, The Cellist of Sarajevo poignantly explores how war can change one's definition of humanity, the effect of music on our emotional endurance, and how a romance with the rituals of daily life can itself be a form of resistance. Reservation Blues - Sherman Alexie Many may remember the tale of Robert Johnson, the musician who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for being the best blues guitarist around. What many may not know is that after this tragic deal in Mississippi, Johnson ended up in a small town on the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington state - at least that's how author Sherman Alexie tells it. In his new book Reservation Blues, Alexie spins the fictional tale of Johnson's adventure at a new crossroads, this one in a small town called Wellpinit, Wash. It is here that he comes to seek out Big Mom, a local medicine woman, and, in so doing, leaves his famous guitar in the hands of misfit storyteller Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Builds-the-Fire takes up Johnson's magical guitar and, along with Victor Joseph, Junior Polatkin and two Flathead Indian sisters named Chess and Checkers, goes on to build a reservation blues band that takes the Northwest by storm. As the band plays club after club, Alexie uses music as a cross-cultural bridge, without compromising the cultural integrity of his characters. The band members seem to take on the gamut of problems faced by Indians on the reservation today, battling everything from alcoholism to violence, political corruption to sexual abuse. Ghosts from the past, both personal and historical haunt the musicians, serving both to hold them back and urge them on.