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Tuesday Tipplers Book Club - newbies welcome

susan_

By susan_
in What's on in East Dulwich

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  • 2 weeks later...
susan_

susan_

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Okay - at long last, here's my list and proposal for next meeting:


Let's meet on the second Tuesday of January - 10th January at 7:45 for 8pm start.


Below are 5 books by Julian Barnes, a British writer I've never read - I ran across his newest novel when searching for inspiration and thought it might be interesting to pick from a list of his writings. He's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, including winning it in 2011. Please PM me with your votes by 5 December and I'll tot up the winner and post it here.


Arthur & George

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

This is a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.


Flaubert's Parrot

Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.


The Sense of an Ending

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.


A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10? Chapters presents a surprising and subversive fictional-history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...

This is no ordinary history, but something stranger; a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.


Levels of Life

In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; he gives us Colonel Fred Burnaby, reluctant adorer of the extravagant Sarah Bernhardt; then, finally, he gives us the story of his own grief, unflinchingly observed.

This is a book of intense honesty and insight; it is at once a celebration of love and a profound examination of sorrow.

  • 1 month later...
susan_

susan_

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So we decided to meet on 21st February and Kenneth volunteered to do a list of books for the February meeting - he'll post on the forum and we can PM him with votes.


Cat volunteered to create a list for our March meeting, but I don't remember if she'd already chosen a theme.

  • 2 weeks later...
susan_

susan_

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Hey everyone - I'm not sure what happened to Kenneth but with time marching on I figured I'd post on his behalf :)


The uncommon reader

A masterpiece of comic brevity. Observer Led by her yapping corgis to the Westminster travelling library outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen finds herself taking out a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Duff read though it proves to be, the following week she withdraws a second, more enjoyable choice of book. This awakens in Her Majesty a passion for reading so great that her public duties begin to suffer. And so, as she devours work by everyone from Hardy to Brookner to Proust to Beckett, her equerries conspire to bring the Queen's literary odyssey to a close. A gloriously entertaining comic narrative, but it is also much more: a deadly serious manifesto for the potential of reading to change lives.


Smut

A marvellous little book, small enough to put in a jacket pocket and so delightful that you'll want to keep taking it out again ... Part of the pleasure here is the unexpected mis-match between respectability and unseemly behaviour, but there's much more to it than that. These novellas are good enough to re-read and enjoy even when the events are no longer unexpected, and the reason is Bennett's sweet, easy prose. There is no sense of effort at all here. It's like watching an expert dancer dance, or an expert ice-skater skate. He just knows how to do it, and that's that


The clothes they stood up in

The Clothes They Stood Up In, the staid Ransomes return from the opera to find their Regent's Park flat stripped bare--right down to the toilet-paper roll. Free of all their earthly belongings, the couple faces a perplexing question: Who are they without the things they've spent a lifetime accumulating? Suddenly a world of unlimited, frightening possibility opens up before them.


The lady in the van

In "The Lady in the Van," which "The Village Voice called "one of the finest bursts of comic writing the twentieth century has produced," Bennett recounts the strange life of Miss Shepherd, a London eccentric who parked her van (overstuffed with decades' worth of old clothes, oozing batteries, and kitchen utensils still in their original packaging) in the author's driveway for more than fifteen years. A mesmerizing portrait of an outsider with an acquisitive taste and an indomitable spirit, this biographical essay is drawn with equal parts fascination and compassion.


They're all by Alan Bennett, of course, as that was the proposed theme. So please PM me two choices by end of day Friday 27 January and I'll post the winner over the weekend.

  • 2 weeks later...
Red_Cat

Red_Cat

Posted
Posted

Hi All,


Attached is the list for next month's book, based on the theme of Ireland in respect of St Patrick's day. PM me your vote if you cant make it tomorrow. Hopefully you can open the attachment, if not, I'll repost tomorrow morning.


Cat x

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