Tuesday Tipplers Book Club - newbies welcome

[susan_]

Hi everyone,

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday 5 May at 7:45 (for 8) in the Tippler on Tuesday 5 May and we will be discussing The Ginger Man by J P Donleavy.

I'll do a list to choose from for our next book. (If someone already claimed the list for next time just let me know).

@julie - you are very welcome to join us. Just read the book and come along on the night. We are usually sat in the front sofas area.

Susan

[Julie82]

Hi Susan,

Is the bookclub still ongoing?

If so, I would love to come to your next neeting.

Best,

Julie

[susan_]

Hi everyone, Just a quick reminder that book club is next Tuesday. I'm about 25% through the Ginger Man and looking forward to the long weekend to finish it.

For next month's list I've chosen the theme of Prison Memoirs (perhaps not the most uplifting subject but I'm really enjoying watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix so there you go). Hopefully something will be of interest and provide some good discussion fodder.

See you all next Tuesday at 7:45 for 8 at the Tippler. First one to arrive please try to snag the sofas in the front (:

Orange Is the New Black: My Time in a Women's Prison

By Piper Kerman

With her career, live-in boyfriend and loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the rebellious young woman who got mixed up with drug runners and delivered a suitcase of drug money to Europe over a decade ago. But when she least expects it, her reckless past catches up with her; convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at an infamous women's prison in Connecticut, Piper becomes inmate #11187-424. From her first strip search to her final release, she learns to navigate this strange world with its arbitrary rules and codes, its unpredictable, even dangerous relationships. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with tokens of generosity, hard truths and simple acts of acceptance.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

By Ted Conover

When Conover?s request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer. So begins his odyssey at Sing Sing, once a model prison but now the state?s most troubled maximum-security facility. The result of his year there is this remarkable look at one of America?s most dangerous prisons, where drugs, gang wars, and sex are rampant, and where the line between violator and violated is often unclear. As sobering as it is suspenseful, Newjack is an indispensable contribution to the urgent debate about our America?s criminal justice system, and a consistently fascinating read.

Memoirs from the Women's Prison

by Nawal El Saadawi

Often likened to Rigoberta Menchu and Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world's leading feminist authors. Director of Health and Education in Cairo, she was summarily dismissed from her post in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981 she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for alleged "crimes against the State" and was not released until after his assassination.

Memoirs from the Women's Prison offers both firsthand witness to women's resistance to state violence and fascinating insights into the formation of women's community. Saadawi describes how political prisoners, both secular intellectuals and Islamic revivalists, forged alliances to demand better conditions and to maintain their sanity in the confines of their cramped cell.

Saadawi's haunting prose makes Memoirs an important work of twentieth-century literature. Recognized as a classic of prison writing, it touches all who are concerned with political oppression, intellectual freedom, and personal dignity.

Hotel K: The Shocking Inside Story of Bali's Most Notorious Jail

by Kathryn Bonella

Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan, or Hotel K, Bali's most notorious jail. Its walls touch paradise; sparkling oceans, surf beaches and palm trees on one side, while on the other it's a dark, bizarre and truly frightening underworld of sex, drugs, violence and squalor.

Hotel K's filthy and disease ridden cells have been home to the infamous and the tragic: a Balinese King, Gordon Ramsay's brother, Muslim terror bombers, beautiful women tourists and surfers from across the globe. Petty thieves share cells with killers, rapists, and gangsters. Hardened drug traffickers sleep alongside unlucky tourists, who've seen their holiday turn from paradise to hell over one ecstasy pill.

Hotel K is the shocking inside story of the jail and its inmates, revealing the wild 'sex nights' organised by corrupt guards for the prisoners who have cash to pay, the jail's ecstasy factory, the killings made to look like suicides, the days out at the beach, the escapes and the corruption that means anything is for sale - including a fully catered Italian jail wedding, or a luxury cell upgrade with a Bose sound system.

The truth about the dark heart of Bali explodes off the page.

[overcaffeinated]

Sorry for late notice - last-minute family visit means I won't be there tonight. My votes are for orange is the new black and guarding sing song. Have failed to read the ginger man - have been distracted by primo levi - but it is next on my list!

[overcaffeinated]

Oh and I'm happy to do the list for next month if helpful, just let me know

[susan_]

Hi everyone, the Tippler is inexplicably shut tonight so I'm going to walk up to the Palmerston and stake out some space. Hope to see you all in there soon.

[susan_]

Thanks to all who attended last night. We were disappointed with the book which (in our eyes) just didn't live up to the glowing recommendations / write up on the back cover.

We chose Orange Is the New Black: My Time in a Women's Prison By Piper Kerman for our next book. Do join us at the Tippler on Tuesday 2nd June at 7:45 for 8pm. (If for any reason the Tippler is shut, then we'll relocate to the Palmerston which was a great option last night)

Overcaffinated - thank you for offering to do the next book list - you're hired!

[susan_]

Hi everyone - just a reminder that book club is on Tuesday - 7:45 for 8pm start at the Tippler.

[overcaffeinated]

Hi all - list for this month's book. Sorry it's a bit late! We've just back from a week in Hay-on-Wye in Wales so I've chosen books shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2015. The first three are fiction, the second here are creative fiction.

See you on Tuesday!

The redemption of Galen Pike - Carys Davies

In a remote Australian settlement a young wife with an untellable secret reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home. A Quaker spinster offers companionship to a condemned man in a Colorado jail. In the ice and snows of Siberia an office employee from Birmingham witnesses a scene that will change her life. At a jubilee celebration in a northern English town a middle-aged alderman opens his heart to Queen Victoria. A teenage daughter leaves home in search of adventure. High in the Cumbrian fells a woman seeks help from her father's enemy. Spare, precise, charged with a prickly wit, the stories in Carys Davies's sparkling second collection remind us how little we know of the lives of others.

The dig - Cynan Jones

This is a searing short novel, built of the interlocking fates of a badger-baiter and a disconsolate farmer, unfolding in a stark rural setting where man, animal, land and weather are at loggerheads. Their two paths converge with tragic inevitability. Jones writes of the physiology of grief and the isolation of loss with brilliance, and about the simple rawness of animal existence with a naturalist's unblinking eye. His is a pared-down prose of resonant simplicity and occasional lushness. His writing about ducks and dogs and cows is axe-sharp. There is not a whiff of the bucolic pastoral or the romanticized sod here. This is a real rural ride. It is short, but crackles with latent compressed energy that makes it swell to fill more space than at first glance it occupies.

Burrard Inlet - Tyler Keevil

Burrard Inlet is the body of water that divides Vancouver's North Shore from the rest of the Lower Mainland. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses that rugged landscape as a backdrop for characters who are struggling against the elements, each other, and themselves. A search-and-rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve; two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend; a reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitcher on his way down Mount Seymour; a young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement. Within that narrative framework, Burrard Inlet becomes more than a geographical location: it is a liminal space, a boundary and a barrier, a threshold to be crossed.

Other people's countries: a journey into memory - Patrick McGuinness

Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People's Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character - full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world. This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child - first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully - 'Most of my childhood,' he says, 'feels more real to me now than it did then'. For all its sharp specifics, though, this is a book about the common, universal concerns of childhood and the slowly developing deep sense of place that is the bedrock for our memories. Alert and affectionate, full of great curiosity and humour, Other People's Countries has all the depth and complexity of its own subject - memory - and is an unfashionably distilled, resonant book: unusual and exquisite.

Down to the sea in ships - Horatio Clare

For millennia, the seaways have carried our goods, cultures and ideas, the terrors of war and the bounties of peace - and they have never been busier than they are today. But though our normality depends on shipping, it is a world which passes largely unconsidered, unseen and unrecorded. Out of sight, in every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men (and they are mostly men) live extraordinary lives, subject to pressures we know - families, relationships, dreams and fears - and to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments. Horatio Clare joins two container ships, travelling in the company of their crews and captains. Together they experience unforgettable journeys: the first, from East to West (Felixstowe to Los Angeles, via Suez) is rich with Mediterranean history, torn with typhoon nights and gilded with an unearthly Pacific peace; the second northerly passage, from Antwerp to Montreal, reeks of diesel, wuthers with gales and goes to frozen regions of the North Atlantic, in deep winter, where the sea itself seems haunted. In Clare's vibrant prose a modern industry does battle with implacable forces, as the ships cross seas of history and incident, while seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, telling their tales and yarns. A beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects, and a fascinating study of big business afloat, Down to the Sea in Ships is a moving tribute to those who live and work on the great waters, far from land.

American Interior - Gruff Rhys

In 1792, John Evans, a twenty-two-year-old farmhand from Snowdonia, Wales, travelled to America to discover whether there was indeed, as widely believed, a tribe of Welsh-speaking native Americans still walking the great plains. In 2012, Gruff Rhys set out on an 'investigative concert tour' in the footsteps of John Evans, with concerts in New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St Louis, North Dakota and more. American Interior is the story of these journeys. It is also an exploration of how wild fantasies interact with hard history and how myth-making can inspire humans to partake in crazy, vain pursuits of glory, including exploration, war and the creative arts.

[susan_]

Great to see everyone on Tuesday and welcome to Holly (: As mentioned I'd be happy to host a little soiree to watch some of the series based on the book. I'll send a PM to arrange. Holly, please do let me know your username if you're interested and I'll include you in the details.

Next month we're reading Other people's countries: a journey into memory by Patrick McGuinness and we're meeting on Tuesday 7 July as the usual time 7:45 for 8pm start at the usual place - The Tippler.

Looking forward to seeing you all next month.

[hollyt]

Hello,

Sorry I've only just seen this! You can see my username now :-) Looking forward to seeing you soon .I've just started July's book...

Holly x

[susan_]

Hi everyone, sorry for the very late posting of next month's date and book.

We are meeting on MONDAY 3 August at the usual time 7:45pm and usual venue The Tippler. The book is Bridge, written by a friend of a long time bookclubber who moved away. I have one spare copy of the book if anyone still needs it. Just PM me.

[sparklehorse]

Tipplers closed. Palmerston?

[hollyt]

Sure, I'm running a bit late!

Holly x

[Red_Cat]

I'm at Palmerston

[hollyt]

Did You Ever Have A Family doesn't come out until 25th August, will that be OK for everyone?

Holly x

[Red_Cat]

Ooh we didn't think of that did we, our second choice seems to be not available at the moment either, I think that's been the problem previously on choosing books from that list. It's okay by me as we still have 3 weeks to read it so

should be alright if everyone else is ok with it.

[kennethw]

I dunno, I finally get my act together and get the first Tuesday of the month free, then it's all changed to meet on Monday. :)

[susan_]

Oh Kenneth! It was just that once - we are back on Tuesdays next month and it would be great to see you :)

We are reading 'Did you ever have a family?' by Bill Clegg and we are meeting on Tuesday 15 September at 7:45pm for an 8pm start at the Tippler

[overcaffeinated]

Hi all - so the book is only available in hardback (when it comes out) at ?17 - or ?6 on kindle. ?17 feels a bit steep... Does everyone have access to a kindle or should we choose something else (I don't but have been contemplating buying one for a while so could be persuaded)?

[Alec John Moore]

You can get the Kindle app for other devices if that helps.

[susan_]

I agree ?17 is steep but I found it for ?10ish at Waterstones. Happy to swap to something else if preferred.

[hollyt]

I've got a kindle so easy for me but happy to change xxx

[sparklehorse]

I have Kindle, but happy to change if it works out expensive for those that don't.

[overcaffeinated]

Let's stick with it and I'll see if I can find it cheaper/will get the app/kindle