January 2012 - Book Choices

Our next meeting is on Tuesday 17th January, at 8.15pm when we will be discussing 'The Corrections' by Johnathan Frantzen. The following are our proposed books for next read:

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Little Women is  set in America in the 1800s. Mr March has gone to war, leaving his penniless family at home: his wife, a caring and benevolent women who knows her daughters inside out, Meg, the eldest daughter who is mature and sensible of their situation, Jo, the daughter who longs to be a boy but tries her best to get along with everyone, Beth, quiet but beautiful and who makes the tiniest thing seem like a great excitement and Amy, the youngest, naughty but loveable.

This book takes us through the joy and sadness of a poor family and you are drawn in from the first page. It is very inspiring as well as emotional and it is a lovely story.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

 

A discomfiting mix of lust and loathing, Yiddish and fascism, and, most of all, the joking and not-joking. This is a book that brings new meaning to the phrase "seriously funny". It's bursting with jokes that will leave you breathless with laughter – but about things that are no laughing matter.

Max Glickman is a cartoonist, son of a boxing-loving father who believes in secular atheism, and a kalooki-playing mother who believes in kalooki. He is a serious artist assumed to be joking all the time.

The books he considers his life work - Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, a history of crimes committed against the Jewish people, and its inevitable sequel, No Bloody Wonder - find few takers...

Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson

In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change forever. 

Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. 

At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age.