Cornflower Books

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 5

 

    I thought the Cornflower Book Group could do with something funny after reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which we'll be talking about from tomorrow, so I've gone back to 1928 and Evelyn Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall.

    This social satire is a "comic, yet curiously touching account of an innocent plunged into the sham, brittle world of high society", as Paul Pennyfeather is sent down from Oxford for a misdemeanour, and then embarks on a series of bizarre adventures which begin in a minor public school where he meets the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde ....

 

    I have read it, along with a lot of Waugh's other books, though that was years ago and I have only the vaguest memory of it now (my old edition is pictured here). I'm hoping it will appeal as much to my adult self as it did to the teenage one, and I'm looking forward to the rediscovery.

    The book should be readily available in shops and libraries, but in case of any difficulty getting hold of it, The Book Depository will ship it worldwide post free. Let's reconvene to talk about Decline and Fall from Saturday, 28th. May, and everyone is welcome to join in, whether you've read along with us before or you feel like taking part for the first time.

Cornflower Book Group - A Morbid Taste for Bones

 

    "Scatter her bones over the stones, It's only a saint whom nobody owns."

    I don't know the origin of those lines, but they cropped up in a book today, spoken by the Scots writer Andrew Lang by the desecrated tomb of Queen Margaret in Dunfermline Abbey. Maybe they were Lang's own, but wherever they are from, they do nicely to introduce Ellis Peters's A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first of the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, in which the ambitious Prior Robert aims to acquire the bones of St. Winifred and take them from their Welsh resting place back to his Benedictine Abbey at Shrewsbury. The relics have been virtually neglected for years, but now that the villagers of Gwytherin find another party interested in their saint, they become proprietorial, and while some are happy to see the bones go to a new home, others are firecely opposed. While negotiations are proceeding, a local landowner who is a chief opponent to the move is murdered; it falls to Brother Cadfael to find his killer.

    I liked this book for its neatness - it's well-ordered and pleasingly controlled - and for the character of Brother Cadfael, his rich history, his shrewdness, his 'irreverence' based on respect for what warrants reverence. He is described as having "a certain spark in his eye" and "a notoriously worldly past", and so the herbalist monk is the most intriguing part of the story, and no doubt he develops interestingly as the chronicles proceed.

    Fast the book is not! There are a full hundred pages before the murder occurs, so much steady scene-setting, but I found it soothing, undemanding bedtime reading, with quite enough to hold my interest but not so gripping that I felt like rushing straight out to get the second in the series. There's a nice mood to the book, and some good lines - on Rhisiart the murdered man: "He had the voice that might have been expected from him, large, melodious and deep, a voice that sang what it felt, and waited for thought afterwards, to find that the thought had been there already in the feeling."

    So for me, not an outstanding book, but a pleasant enough one. What did you think of it? 

(ETA: The 'Books and Cakes' post for Brother Cadfael is here).

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 4

 

     This coming Saturday the Cornflower Book Group will be discussing the first of Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, but for our April book we shall be moving far away from a 1970s depiction of twelfth century monks, going instead to late Victorian England, the aesthetic movement, and the scandalous Oscar Wilde, with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

     "Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence."

   

    A Faustian pact, hedonism, gothic horror clad in silken draperies ... there will be lots here to interest us, I should think! I've chosen the Penguin Classics edition pictured above as it comes with two introductions - one of them by Peter Ackroyd - and contemporary reviews, but any copy you can get hold of will be fine. The novel should be widely available (though in case of difficulty, The Book Depository will send it anywhere in the world, post-free), and at just over 200 pages, it shouldn't take us very long to get through, so how about we set our discussion date for Saturday, 23rd. April.

    I say this every month, but the group is open to all who care to read the book and give us the benefit of their thoughts on it, on or after the set date. A few words will suffice, or a much longer analysis - regardless of length, your contribution will be welcome, so I hope Mr. Wilde and his Mr. Gray will not disappoint.

Cornflower Book Group - South Riding

   

     "... a rich, panoramic novel, bringing vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change." Indeed it is, but what the cover copy did not lead me to expect was quite what a roiling mix of passion and principle drives Winifred Holtby's 1930s novel South Riding. 

    From the almost gothic romance between Robert Carne and Sarah Burton - he the brooding, reactionary squire, she the spirited, modern headmistress - to the social commentary and proselytizing on issues of welfare, rights and mores, the book is part Victorian melodrama or Bronte-esque 'Penny Dreadful' almost, part fictionalised political tract. It's a curious combination, with untempered passages which take it over the edge of the sentimental, to other parts which amount to a measured hymn of praise for humanity. As a portrait of an area and a period it is quite compelling, and it's a book for which many readers will have much affection, I'm sure.

    I enjoyed it thoroughly, its socially conscious social conscience, its picture of encroaching 'progress', and the end of the old ways, its Mr. Rochester hero, the generous, indefatigable, loving Mrs. Beddows, always compensating for others' failings, the emancipated, idealistic Miss Burton who is all too human; there's so much there - too much, perhaps. Some plotlines have impossibly sudden, neat solutions, viz. the Hollys and the problem of Lydia's education, while elsewhere ... well, I'd have wished for another outcome for Carne. As for the odious Snaith and Huggins, do they not make your flesh creep in their different ways?!

    There were some great lines such as the condemnation of Carne's modernist sister-in-law: "All fish and finger-bowls and no common sense", Mrs. Huggins " 'washing out a few things' when she needed them, thus preserving her amateur status, as it were, in domestic labour...", Mr. Drew who "did business in a small way, but [...] moral censorship in quite a large one" (and he does literary criticism as well - see p. 270); but all in all it's a great story and an absorbing read. What did you think of it?

PS. Here's what to eat with South Riding.

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 3

 

     When I asked the other day whether you'd read any Ellis Peters, I had not thought of choosing one of her books for the Cornflower Book Group, but Efi in her comment on that post suggested it, Susan seconded it, so why not?

    I've gone for the first of the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, A Morbid Taste for Bones (first published 1977), in which the herbalist monk becomes detective when a dispute over saintly relics results in murder. Popular books, these - though I shall bear in mind Erika's comment on lack of period feel - but as someone with no particular knowledge of the time (1137) and place, I look forward to being entertained, and if this one goes down well there are many more in the series to enjoy.

    The book should be readily available to borrow or buy; I got my copy from The Book Depository (and they will deliver worldwide free), Amazon UK has it, as does Amazon US (in both paperback and Kindle version) while bookshops should have it or be able to get it for you easily. We're going to be discussing Winifred Holtby's South Riding on 26th. February, so let's go back in time to the Middle Ages and talk about A Morbid Taste for Bones four weeks later on Saturday, 26th. March. As always, anyone who'd like to read the book (or who has already read it) is welcome to join in.

Cornflower Book Group - The Bookshop

 

     This could be a short post as I'm tempted just to say, if you've read The Bookshop I hope you enjoyed it as thoroughly as I did (I thought it was wonderful) and if you haven't read it yet, do so with all speed!

     Florence Green decides "to take a step forward in middle age" and opens a bookshop in the small seaside town of Hardborough. She has to contend with undue influence and local hierearchies, petty rivalries and jealousies, a supernatural presence, and a clientele whose tastes run more to the Life of Queen Mary (it is 1959*) than to the modern novel, but then her decision to stock Nabokov's Lolita proves to be both a money-spinner and a further cause of her undoing.

    Wryly funny with moments of pure comedy - but also others of resigned regret, and exquisitely written with not a superfluous word nor an ill-chosen one, even the most slight of scenes and characters are beautifully drawn, and there are lines a-plenty worth quoting. From Milo North whose "fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it could settle down to its own advantage" to Violet Gamart who "from long habit .. rejected the idea that her husband might be necessary for anything", the "Mixed Infant", and the bookshop stock - "... a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made any demand", everything is just so, testament to how fine a writer Penelope Fitzgerald was.

    The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978 when Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea won, though Penelope Fitzgerald did go on to win in 1979 with Offshore, but for me it's a miniature piece of perfection which goes straight on to my 'books of the year' longlist. 

    What did you think of it?

 

*Too early for Prince Charles's taste for cherry brandy, to which Florence and Mrs. Gipping refer, to have been made public, surely, but maybe the Hardborough ladies are gifted with prescience or have a friend  - Mrs. Gamart's nephew? - at court!

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 2

 

     I'm getting ahead of myself again, announcing next month's Cornflower Book Group title before getting my own copy, but this is a long book so I wanted to give everyone plenty of time to read it. I've chosen Winifred Holtby's novel South Riding, which was published posthumously in 1936 and won the James Tait Black Prize that year. As you'll have guessed, it came to mind just now because the BBC are shortly to broadcast a dramatisation, so I thought that as this might prompt lots of us to read it anyway, why not choose it for the group?

    At 544 pages in the edition pictured here (there is a television tie-in version, too) we shan't be whizzing through it in just a day or two, but if we set the discussion date for Saturday, 26th. February, that allows us almost seven weeks, and as it should be easy to get hold of (again, for readers outwith Britain, Amazon.com has it - albeit through third party sellers - and The Book Depository stocks it and offers free worldwide delivery), I hope that won't pose any problems.

    A young and idealistic head mistress, a brilliant student whose education must be sacrificed when her mother's health fails, a landowner, "proud, haunted, almost ruined", these are the central characters of this "rich, panoramic novel, [which brings] vividly to life a rural community on the brink of change."

    Are you game? I hope so.  

CBG 2011: Vol 1 (cont.)

 
   A little more on our Book Group title for January now that my copy has at last turned up. Firstly the superficial, and I do like this cover of The Bookshop better than the one over there in the sidebar; more importantly, some cover quotes to whet the appetite:

"A gem, a vintage narrative ... a classic whose force as a piece of physical and moral map-making has not merely lasted but has actually improved in the passage of year", says the New York Times, while The Spectator goes for "Solid and satisfying. Every action in it matters, however small." The TLS comments "Penelope Fitzgerald's resources of odd people are impressively rich. And this is not just a gallery of quirky still lives; these people appear in vignettes, wryly, even comically animated ... A marvellously piercing fiction."

    It will be interesting to see how this slight book measures up to the above.

    Just to re-iterate, we'll begin talking about the book on Saturday, 22nd. January, so there's plenty of time to join in if you'd like to do so.

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 1

    I'm not supposed to be here just now but I'm popping in briefly to give you the name of the Cornflower Book Group's January book. What with bank holidays, closed shops and libraries and disrupted postal service I thought I wouldn't wait to get my own copy but just let you know now that it is Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, and I've put it in the diary for discussion from Saturday, 22nd. January.

    It's a short novel (under 200 pages) and it's set in 1959 in a tiny English seaside town where Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, buys a medieval building and turns it into a bookshop - the town's first; by the sound of things, all does not go according to plan.

    I hope everyone who wants to read this will be able to get a copy easily (The Book Depository can supply it with free worldwide delivery if you have any trouble finding it locally), and do please join in with us if you'd like to - we are nice!

The CBG at the BBC

   I asked a wee while ago which Cornflower Book Group books had stood out for you this year, and I can now explain why I particularly wanted to know. I was delighted to be asked to take part in BBC Radio Scotland's Book Café programme again, sharing the microphone this time with my friend Vanessa Robertson from The Edinburgh Bookshop and Fidra Books. We should have been on last Monday but severe weather here meant the programme had to be cancelled; happily our segment was rescheduled for today, and I'm just back from the studio, winding down with a cup of tea and wondering how it all went - from the listener's point of view!

    Vanessa and I were talking about our reading highlights of the year and what we've found to be most popular, both in her shop and here on the blog and with the Book Group. If you're minded to listen to us you can do so by clicking on the link above. 

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 12

 

    I hope I'm not just being self-indulgent here, choosing for the CBG a book that I've wanted to read for a long time, but seeing the comments on Marilynne Robinson's work the other day, the enthusiasm and appreciation of those who have read her, the interest of those yet to do so, I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate to pick Housekeeping as our December book, and the one to round off the group's third year.

    "One of The Observer's 100 greatest novels of all time"; "A haunting poetic story, drowned in water and light"; "A novel of quite exceptional subtlety ... as quietly humorous as it is heartbreakingly sad"; "...among the masterpieces of twentieth century American fiction".

On another book these appraisals might be seen as uncomfortably close to hyperbole, but from what I've read of this one and of its author's reputation, they are accurate and justified. It is the story of Ruth and Lucille, "orphans growing up in the small desolate town of Fingerbone in the vast northwest of America. Abandoned by a succession of relatives, the sisters find themselves in the care of Sylvie, the remote and enigmatic sister of their dead mother. Steeped in imagery of the bleak wintry landscape around them, the sisters' struggle towards adulthood is powerfully portrayed in a novel about loss, loneliness and transience."

    I know Christmas looms and reading time may be restricted over the next few weeks, but Housekeeping isn't a long book so I'm hoping we can all manage to fit it in between now and Saturday, 18th. December. I should think copies will be easily found in libraries and shops as well as online (in case of difficulty, The Book Depository has it with free worldwide delivery, and amusingly, Amazon also offer other housekeeping products on the same page (scroll  down) - dustpan and brush, anyone?).

    If you haven't read along with the group before but would like to do so now, please join us - we don't bite!

Cornflower Book Group - A Game of Hide and Seek

 

    "The drawing-room fire was somehow between times; its beautiful afternoon crispness and energy gone, and the logs which had been put on for after supper hissing steadily."

    There's a lull in the middle of Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek, much like that dampened fire, and the stilling of the pace, the relative muteness of tone, is of a piece with the story itself which is one of love left to die down in youth only to be rekindled in middle age.

    There is much to admire in this novel - its 'knowingness', for example, in that it seems emotionally very intelligent, very astute; there are its perfectly delineated supporting characters, and then at the heart of it, the progress of the weak, affected Vesey and Harriet, the young woman who accepts marriage to a man with whom she is not in love as the only option open to her, but invests in that nonetheless comfortable life nothing more than is necessary for convenience's sake.

    It's a sad tale and one that seems informed by cynicism (or maybe just the human condition), but there's a lot of humour, too, and both the lighter-hearted and the more painful moments speak of keen observation and perception based on experience. I found it an intriguing book - unsympathetic but penetrating, convincingly staged but with an ambiguous ending. What did you think of it?

Cornflower Book Group - The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

   Linked stories given a fable-like telling, an investigation into the 'science' of theology, a desire to find a plan, a pattern, a cause or reason for what happens to us, and a meditation on love. That, I suppose, is the essence of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey and I had great hopes of it as the premise was so interesting and it came strongly recommended, but it failed to make an impact on me, I'm afraid. I found myself feeling glad it was short, and that I'd had enough when I reached the end.

    Why was that? I can't love every book I pick up, though I can certainly appreciate the beauty and precision of the writing here, the economy of the prose, the intellect behind it. Is it because it reads like a collection of short stories rather than a novel and thus my appetite for something more substantial, something with more marked rhythms was not satisfied? Maybe that's it, or perhaps I just read it on the wrong day, in the wrong mood.

    I'll say no more and hand it over to all of you in the hope that you fared better than I did.

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 11

 

     "During summer games of hide and seek Harriet falls in love with Vesey and his elusive, teasing ways. When he goes to Oxford, she cherishes his photograph and waits for the letter that never comes. Years pass, and Harriet stifles her imaginings; with a husband and daughter, she excels at respectability. But then Vesey reappears, and her marriage seems to melt away. Harriet is older, it is much too late, but she is still in love with him."

    That's Elizabeth Taylor's 1951 novel A Game of Hide and Seek, said by many - her biographer Nicola Beauman included - to be her finest work, and the one I've chosen for the Cornflower Book Group to read in November.

    Recognising that some of us had trouble with Troubles, and without wishing to pre-empt next week's discussion, that The Bridge ... could fall a bit flat, as it were, I thought that for our next book we might return to the sort of territory occupied by Elizabeth Jenkins' marvellous The Tortoise and the Hare which went down so well last year.

    This "story whose theme is love" and which "has something of the lucid delicacies of Persuasion together with, at moments, more than a touch of the fiery-icy strangeness of Wuthering Heights" (Elizabeth Bowen), may already be well known to many of you; it will be new to me (though I recognise the cover of this edition from my mother's bookshelves!).

    Let's come back here to talk about the book from Saturday, 20th. November - copies should be easily found through shops, libraries, and online (The Book Depository has it at a very competitive price and offers free worldwide delivery). If you haven't read along with us before but would like to join in now, please do!

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 10

 

     Slightly later than it should have been posted, here is the CBG's October book:

Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, "a little masterpiece", won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928. The story of the breaking of an Inca-woven osier bridge above a gorge on the road from Lima to Cuzco, and the investigation into the lives of those who perished by the Franciscan monk Brother Juniper, who witnessed the collapse, it examines whether "we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan."

    This is a short book (124 pages in my edition) and one which has attained classic status and influenced many other writers. Described as having a "deceptive clarity of style that masks pellucid depths", it sounds intriguing and very worthwhile reading.

    This should be readily available everywhere, though as I always say for Book Group books, if you can't get it locally The Book Depository will send it post-free, (and there's a Kindle version, too). Let's 'meet' back here to discuss it from Saturday, 23rd. October - that should give us enough time to read it as it's nicely compact!

Cornflower Book Group - Troubles

 

     J.G. Farrell's Troubles is quite the book! Drama, black comedy, pathos, farce - all are played out in the labyrinthine corridors and endless rooms of the Majestic Hotel in rural Ireland around 1920, as political unrest and violence increase and threaten the residents of this eccentric establishment.

    The book's characters are dwarfed by the vast edifice within which they live, though they and it combined make for a sort of grandly gothic Fawlty Towers with a touch of Gormenghast thrown in. For me, the hotel was the star  - never mind the ineffectual and increasingly distracted owner Edward Spencer, nor the Major who somehow cannot bring himself to leave the place - no, it's the cats in the Imperial Bar, the impenetrable foliage and "ambitious plants" of the Palm Court, the "Do More" generator which could hardly do less, the proliferation of old ladies and even older, more crumbly retainers, the piglets in the squash court, the dogs with their daube de mouton, the insidious decay and deterioration, the immensity of the place, all that is what is done so well and it's that which makes the book so memorable.

    I was interested in how J.G. Farrell constructs the story and therefore how it reads, e.g. the lack of chapters (there is just the occasional brief newspaper report to break up the narrative) means it's all of a piece and there are times when it feels not like hard going exactly, but more a lengthy trudge through a featureless bog! Progress - the story's and the reader's - seems slow. But then there are subtle shifts of pace and purpose and things begin to hot up in more ways than one until you reach the climax which, I think, is superb.

    How about you? Did you make it to the blistering finish, or did you pack your bags and take your leave of the Majestic somewhere along the way?

(Later: The Troubles cake is here).

Cornflower Book Group - I Capture the Castle

   

    Reading Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle was - for me - like looking at a beautiful piece of old chintz: there are patches where the glaze still holds and it shines, parts which are faded, where the colours are washed to a mellowness, some bits worn threadbare and elsewhere areas which are still crisp and intensely vivid. There is texture to touch and pattern for the eye to follow, and with so much richness I was quickly drawn into the book's shabbily comfortable world and wanted nothing more than to linger there.

    All in all I found it romantic, eccentric, charming, spirited, quaint, nostalgic, magical and mad! I can see why Ralph Vaughan Williams named it as his book of the year in 1949, and Christopher Isherwood said "you can live in it, like Dickens". I can see just as clearly how 'the wrong reader', if I may put it that way, would be irritated - though not bored, I should think - mystified by its enormous success and puzzled by its characters' responses to the situations in which they find themselves.

    Which camp are you in?

    (The book's cake, by the way, is here).

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 9

   

   Earlier in the year when the Lost Man Booker Prize was the talk of the moment, strong support was shown for J.G. Farrell's novel Troubles, and indeed it was the eventual winner. I didn't manage to get to it at the time, but looking at possibilities for the Book Group's September title, I thought it might fit the bill nicely.

    This article by Rachel Cooke makes a very good case for reading it, and reviews suggest it amuses, impresses and entertains in equal measure. Set in a grand but crumbling hotel in rural Ireland in 1919, the increasingly violent struggle for independence will surely encroach on the quietly fading haven in which Major Brendan Archer is passing the summer. According to Rachel Cooke, the ending - "high drama followed by a soaring epiphany" is one of the best she has read, while other commentators refer to the book as "a work of genius" and praise its "set-pieces and characterisation ... softly constructed around an original, though faithful, representation of the historical context."

   I'm keen to read it and hope many others are too. As far as availability goes, my catalogue checks suggest libraries will have it, shops should stock it or be able to get it easily, there is a Kindle version in addition to the paperback, Amazon US has it and The Book Depository will send it anywhere, post-free.

    As we're talking about I Capture the Castle from next weekend (28th. August), let's get together on Saturday, 25th. September to discuss Troubles. As usual, everyone is most welcome to join in.

Cornflower Book Group - The Go-Between

 

   "... had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room, where the curtains were not even drawn to hide the cold rain beating on the windows, or contemplating the accumulation of the past and the duty it imposed on me to sort it out. I should be sitting in another room, rainbow-hued, looking not into the past but into the future: and I should not be sitting alone."

     There speaks Leo Colston of the events of July 1900 when, as a boy of twelve, he was a guest of the Maudsley family at Brandham Hall in Norfolk. His stay coincided with a heatwave, the mercury rising to new heights each day as Leo assumed the rôle of Mercury, messenger to the gods - but in Leo's case he was messenger to ill-fated lovers.

    L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between is a very finely wrought book, an acute psychological study rooted in the fertile soil of class, propriety and social divisions - sometimes slight and subtle ones, but brutally divisive nonetheless. Here the child is agent or pawn of the adults, and innocence and inexperience play against manipulative, self-serving will. This happens in an intense and stifling hot-house atmosphere, and that heat - both literal and metaphorical - although labelled by Leo "a liberating power", is as pressure to the narrative, supporting it, confining it, and then building to a point at which it cannot be contained.

    Leo's memories of the time and place, and the devastating conclusion to his visit to the Hall are initially ones of loneliness and isolation - uncomfortably not quite fitting in - then of an "afflatus of spirit" where "to be in tune with all that Brandham Hall meant, I must increase my stature, I must act on a grander scale." As he worships Marian Maudsley, the daughter of the house, and willingly carries messages between her and Ted, the tenant farmer, so he becomes party to deception and disloyalty and a player in a dangerous game, but Leo 'belongs' then, he has a position, an importance and he believes "luck was in love with me, like everyone else."

    The novel's conclusion sees Leo back at Brandham in adulthood, embarking on a final "errand of love", still the go-between, bringing people together in an effort to make them happy and in an attempt to make himself whole.

    What did you think of the book?

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 8

  

    I've been swithering over next month's Cornflower Book Group book, trying to balance periods, genres, countries, take account of availability and pick something which will prove a popular choice and an enjoyable read. As for a lot of us it is holiday time, we may be going away or perhaps have visitors staying and there may not be much opportunity for focus or sustained concentration, so a "difficult" book might not be right for August.

    A few months ago, the overwhelmingly positive response to this post made me want to read I Capture the Castle as soon as possible, and so when Harriet suggested it for the group in an attempt to stop my endless deliberation today, I thought she'd come up with a good idea (and the cover image did not influence me a bit).

     So many of you have read it already that you'll probably be able to comment without re-reading, while others, like me, who have long planned to read it might welcome a little gentle prod to pick up this lovely and much-loved book.

     If you don't already have it it should be easily obtainable no matter where you are (though if not, The Book Depository will ship worldwide free), and if we slot it in for discussion beginning Saturday, 28th. August, there should be time for anyone who wants to to take it at a fairly leisurely pace. We'll convene this Saturday (24th. July) to talk about The Go-Between, but I hope there will be lots of eager participants for Dodie Smith's 1949 classic next month - all welcome!