Our Book Choice for Januay/February 2012

So many different published versions!

We are currently reading Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

This is a true classic that we hope will inspire all our members to pick up the book, read it and come along to discuss their thoughts and feelings on Tuesday 13th March. We are expecting many different variations of dust cover/jacket and that, in itself, will be a point for discussion.

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 Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I only got to page 335 of 653 - this was the first time since we started Ashendon Book Group (January 2005) that I had failed to finish a book. I was, however, brave enough to turn up to our meeting and admit my defeat. 

Turns out I was not alone - of the 9 members who came along last night just 2 had finished this 'tome' of a book. 

It's not really a bad book though. The defence of the non-finisher was more that:

"It was hard to get into." 

"It lacked chapters." 

"It was taking so long that I read it 'diagonally' (not every word".) 

This is a book that takes time and commitment. It's not one to read whilst drying your hair, or for 5 minutes before bed. Mary (a finisher) said it all: "I realised I wouldn't finish if I kept trying to read a couple of pages at a time so I made time for it."

All was not lost as there was still much to discuss from the bits we had read and our discussion was as lively as ever. 

This story is about an American family very much in need of correction from their self-inflicted damage. It is loaded with rich language, numerous incidents and multiple twists and turns. It appears to be well, and extensively, researched and tells the story of an extreme, though not unreal, small town American family. Not one page was turned without having learned even more about the characters and their lives. 

Every character draws emotional response from the reader - here is what we felt:

Enid - was disliked throughout, she was supposed to be a loving mother and yet she let her family down through continual disapproval of her children's failings compared to the neighbours'. Those who did get close to the end of the story softened toward her a little though.

Alfred - as a young father he was not so easy to like, as a sick old man it was easier and it was easy to forgive him his failings as he had Enid to contend with and clearly Denise loved him, and he loved Denise AND we loved Denise...

Denise - she worked hard, was very talented, had some cracking affairs and was continually put down by her mother - why would we not love her too?

Chip - my personal favourite though clearly quite 'off the rails’ and his salmon incident raised the biggest laugh!

Gary - well, the poor man, he tried so hard not to be like his father yet was doomed to failure through his choice of wife - the horribly cruel (evil, nasty, manipulative) Caroline. 

So, would we recommend this book? Well, on balance no, not really - it was depressing and a bit unnecessary and, let's face it, all too easy to give up on. 

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.

 

Our Book Choice for December 2011/January 2012

We are currently reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and will meet to discuss on Tuesday 17th January.

It's another book that will have a selection of different covers depending on which edition you manage to purchase.

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century-a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.

After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives.

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

If you want to know more about the author then here's a link. Jonathan Franzen - The Author

This month the group was torn between our chosen book (The Corrections) and Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. So anyone who would like to read Moon Tiger 'as well as' there will also be a few of us doing the same.

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

It was a mixed response: "loved it" "couldn't get into it" "found it distressing" "a big story" "I wanted a bit more story" and so on. So it was a lively conversation at Gatehangers last night and an excellent choice of book for a book group.

For ladies of Ashendon, poles apart from the tower block estates of London, a glossary was needed. That said some of our members are a little more 'streetwise' than others mainly thanks to our teenagers.

Bostyles (Bo in Bucks apparently), Advise yourself, Goawayou and Hutius are new to the Ashendon dialect. What we did love was how well Stephen presented 'new' language and then followed up by using the words in context until we understood what they meant.

We also agreed the writing was brilliant - it was easy to believe it was an 11 year old telling the story in his own way, and at his own tangents that illustrates how innocence is quickly lost, how bad influence comes to bear but how a good person and a good heart stays true.

Who is the pigeon? what is the pigeon? we debated this for sometime and concluded it represents Harri's conscience (or a guardian angel).

We discussed many incidents described, and observations made, in this rich text. Too many to mention here and unfair to go into detail for fear of spoiling the story. It is a sad, and often shocking, tale but there are some truly lovely moments such as: winning the race, the relationship with Poppy, the Diadora trainers, ASBO the dog to name just a few.

Would we recommend this book? Well..not to our mothers! BUT we would to certain people - including our teenage children (despite the language which apparently they all use anyway!). Why? because it's a powerful study of society - a modern day Lord of the Flies - and actually (we feel) it could be a good book to study for English Literature.