Tuesday Tipplers Book Club - newbies welcome

[sparklehorse]

Ok am here round the back Ex

[marlowe]

Hello, we decided on Breakfast at Tiffany's. Next meeting is June 14th.

[susan_]

Hi All - I'm looking forward to bookclub this evening. Who's coming out? Don't let me be "Billy No Mates"

[overcaffeinated]

I'll be there!

[hollyt]

I don't know if I can make or yet. I'm going away on Friday and I have quite a few things to do. In any case I haven't read the book either. I'll try and come for a drink if I get chance a bit later.

Holly x

[Red_Cat]

Am intending on being there, see you later!

[marlowe]

I'll be there.

[JenniferJ]

Sorry this is so late, but here is the rather tenuous "Summer Reads" book choices up for voting tonight. I hope to make it later but if not I vote for Cinnamon Kiss 1st and Room with A View 2nd.

Jen x

Walter Mosley - Cinnamon Kiss

It is the Summer of Love as CINNAMON KISS opens, and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armoured car. It's further outside the law than Easy has ever travelled, but his daughter Feather needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch.

Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric, prominent attorney. His assistant of sort, the beautiful 'Cinnamon' Cargill, has gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told - Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory.

Hotel World - Ali Smith

Five people: four are living, three are strangers, two are sisters, one is dead. In her highly acclaimed and most ambitious book to date, the brilliant young Scottish writer Ali Smith brings alive five unforgettable characters and traces their intersecting lives. This is a short novel with big themes (time, chance, money, death) but an eye for tiny detail: the taste of dust, the weight of a few coins in the hand, the pleasurable pain of a stone in one's shoe . . .

'Ali Smith has got style, ideas and punch. Read her' Jeanette Winterson

'An extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around. Hotel World is essential reading from a writer confirming herself as a major talent. . . a wonderful piece of sustained imagination' Independent

'As infectious as a pop song, the story bursts open form the very first page and demands to be read in one sitting' The Times

A Room with a View - E.M. Forster

Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fianc? Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

Solar - Ian McEwan

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, this is a story of one man's greed and self-deception; a darkly satirical novel showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time.

A Foreign Country - Francine Stock

Daphne is a 74 year old woman, reserved and tenaciously independent, whose wartime past comes to haunt her in this remarkably accomplished first novel. In the war she worked at the War Office, having to interview italians arrested in dawn raids in London, and had to decide which are/are not fascists and should be interned. As a result, hundreds of italians are embarked on a ship which is torpedoed, and most of them drown. Back in the present, the woman's son is a tv journalist who makes documentaries about wars in far-off places. The novel moves between his coverage of a war in southern republic of the ex-USSR, and his mother's wartime life. His girlfriend, also in TV, starts uncovering fascinating material about the Italians in wartime London, and moves in on his mother. Meanwhile Daphne has also heard from one of the survivors, now in Australia. It 's a compelling exploration of how we edit life, past and present, about how even the smallest actions can reverberate, about how decisions which seem right and understandable at one time and place can be interpreted quite differently in a different time and place. The past is definitely a foreign country.

[susan_]

Morning all - Hotel World by Ali Smith won our democratic vote for this month's book.

We'll meet at the Tippler on Tuesday 19 July at the usual 19:45 for 20:00 start.

I'm doing the list for next month on the theme Europe :)

See you there!

(Newcomers - just read the book and turn up)

[susan_]

Hello all - I'm not feeling very well so I'm not going to make it to bookclub tomorrow evening. I did do the list (very loosely interpreted theme Europe), so I hope you find something you like! I'll PM my votes through.

Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin

A notice in The Times addressed to 'Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine' advertises a 'small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let furnished for the month of April'. Four very different women take up the offer, escaping dreary London for the sunshine of Italy. Among the party are Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arthuthnot, both fleeing unappreciative husbands; beautiful Lady Caroline, sick of being 'grabbed' by lovestruck men; and the imperious Mrs Fisher, who spends her time remembering the bearded 'great men' she knew in her Victorian childhood. By the end of their holiday, all the women will fall completely under the spell of Italy in this funny, insightful and very charming novel.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Bower

Tells the tale of a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard. She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without 'coupons', and she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals. An unsparing, wry 1946 novel.

One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes

It is a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without 'those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings'. Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. First published in 1947, this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, charting, too, a gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle-class life.

The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier

The classic tale of a journey through war-torn Europe.

Alone and fending for themselves in a Poland devastated by World War Two, Jan and his three homeless friends cling to the silver sword as a symbol of hope. As they travel through Europe towards Switzerland, where they believe they will be reunited with their parents, they encounter many hardships and dangers. This extraordinarily moving account of an epic journey gives a remarkable insight into the reality of a Europe laid waste by war.

World War Z by Matt Brooks

It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight-back against the horde, World War Z brings the very finest traditions of American journalism to bear on what is surely the most incredible story in the history of civilisation

[Red_Cat]

Am planning on going tonight but just wanted to check if anyone else is?

[overcaffeinated]

I am!

[JenniferJ]

On my way too x

[susan_]

Sooooo what book did you pick and when are we meeting next?

...baited breath and all

[overcaffeinated]

Enchanted April and 16 Aug.

I can't remember who said they'd do the next list...?

[kennethw]

I'm doing the list for next month, on a feelgood theme. Happy endings all round.

[mptissot]

Hi guys,

I moved to East Dulwich recently and was looking for a book club to join. I found this thread and thought I'd ask if it's okay to join?

Thanks!!

Pia x

[Red_Cat]

Hello Pia,

Yes you're very welcome to join, our next meeting is this Tuesday at House of Tippler on Lordship Lane about 8 O'clockish, we generally sit through the back on the left.

Hope to see you then.

Cat

[susan_]

Hi everyone, I've just realised I won't be able to attend this month as I'm going to the theatre on the 16th. Really sorry to miss it :(

Susan

[kennethw]

Hi everyone,

I'll be along this evening, I said I'd do a list on a feelgood theme as we all needed a bit of a laugh, and ended up putting together a list of diaries.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole ? Sue Townsend ? 276pp

Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary follows a year in the life of a teenager in the Midlands in the 1980s.

Bridget Jones Diary ? Helen Fielding ? 324 pp

A dazzling urban satire of modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something? Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), supported by four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.

The P45 Diaries ? Ben Hatch ? 295 pp

Jay is 18 and keeps a diary better than he keeps any job. His countless sackings and relentless taunting of his father?s BBC celebrity friends mix with the emotions of a family adjusting to loss. Jay dreams of running away to Africa to dig water wells, of becoming a freedom-fighter in Syria and of making it so big in the lawnmower business he owns a kidney-bean shaped swimming pool full of bunny girls. But first he has to stop watching Countdown in his pyjamas.

The Diary of a Nobody ? by George Grossmith ? 229 pp

This classic comic tale of Victorian suburbia was created by two brothers ; George did most of the writing and Weedon provided the famous illustrations. The book?s narrator, Mr Pooter, is ?a sublime comic creation? and the word Pooterish can now be found in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys - by Samuel Pepys - 196pp

The essential writings of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), a remarkable man who witnessed the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666. Originally scribbled in a cryptic shorthand, Pepys's quotidian journal of life in Restoration London provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues; naval, church, and cultural affairs; and the sexual escapades and domestic strife of a man with a voracious, childlike appetite for living. (I know it's non-fiction but I saw the byline and thought I'd include it)

Enjoy,

Kenneth

[marlowe]

I'm coming

[kennethw]

I'm here, sitting in the back part of the bar. Wearing blue. ☺

[Red_Cat]

I'll be there, just got to prise myself away from the Olympics...

[overcaffeinated]

Neither Holly nor I can make it - sorry! She's stuck at work and I'm knackered :(

I vote for P45 and diary of a nobody; Holly votes for P45 and Samuel Pepys.

See you next month.

[kennethw]

The choice for next month is....The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, and we picked 13 September as a date, so see you all at the Tippler at 8pm.