Reading Choices for June/July 2018

Here are our Summer read choices.

The Book of Dust, Volume 1, La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his dæmon, Asta, live with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford. Across the River Thames (which Malcolm navigates often using his beloved canoe, a boat by the name of La Belle Sauvage) is the Godstow Priory where the nuns live. Malcolm learns they have a guest with them; a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua.

This is a rip-roaring adventure book, which manages to throw in a boat-load of characters and scenes, despite never leaving the Thames. Of course, this is a different world, and a due to circumstances that emerge in the book, a very different Thames. The story is - once it really gets going - about two characters on a journey, and it is reminiscent of many other similar stories, being somewhat episodic and lacking in all but the most basic overall plot.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence.

Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.

Queen of the Elephants by Mark Shand

Mark Shand trekked 300 miles across East Benghal and Assam on the back of an elephant with Parbato Barua, the foremost and only female elephant trainer in all India. This book describes the experiences shared during this remarkable journey - joining a government 'elephant squad' together with local villagers to chase a band of wild elephants off a tea estate, and making a stop at Parbati's ancestral home, now a virtual shrine to her father's lifelong work with elephants. The importance of this ancient knowledge becomes clear: if not preserved, the Asian elephant stands an even greater chance of disappearing altogether.



We will choose our next book at our meeting at 8pm on Thursday 24th May, at The Hundred when we will discuss our current read: The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.