The book we’re reading for our next book club night in late May 2011 is Joseph O’Connor’s novel Ghost Light. In early May 2011 we read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography Infidel, an extraordinary and compelling book of a brave, free thinker.
Category Archives: Book Club
Jenn Ashworth: A Kind of Intimacy
Our next Wise Owl Book Club, in April, is Jenn Ashworth’s A Kind of Intimacy. If you are interested in joining the book club, email me editor AT joearmstrong.ie
Voltaire and Bees
Voltaire’s Candide intrigued the book club not least by the realisation of two apparent endings. One with ‘cultivate your garden’ and another where he said ‘Sod it. I’m bored. I’m off to Lisdoonvarna’ – or something like that. As evening turned closer to dawn and one member was in danger of missing a flight, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (not a prescribed text) evoked lots of chatter of matters profound, as did contemplation of the miners in Chile. As for the Secret Life of Bees, two members (one absent) hated it. War was averted – just about – as a clash of Titans threatened to disturb the cosmos given the diametrically opposed appraisals of the said buzzing book.
Joshua Ferris: Then We Came to the End
Next club night, in June 2010, we’ll be discussing Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End.
J.G.Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur
Members loved J.G.Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. It’s one to read and to keep. It’s hilarious. Excellently written. It had one member in stitches of laughter. A work of genius, so well-observed. It shows, doesn’t tell. Ten out of ten.
Some books we’ve read in Wise Owl book club
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi: Infidel
Amis, Martin: Experience
Ashworth, Jenn: A Kind of Intimacy
Barbery,Muriel: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Bayley, John: Iris
Barry, Sebastian: A Long,Long Way
Ben Jelloun, Tahar: The Blinding Absence of Light
Browne, Dan: The Da Vinci Code
Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood
Carey, Peter: Theft
Carter, Angela: The Magic Toyshop
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Chandler, Raymond: The Big Sleep
Change, Jung: Mao: the Untold Story
Chekhov, Anton: The Lady with the Little Dog & Other Stories
Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Doyle, Roddy: Oh, Play That Thing
Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent
Eugenides, Jeffrey: Middlesex
Farrell J.G.: The Siege of Krishnapur
Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong
Ferris, Joshua: Then We Came to the End
Fitzgerald, F Scott: The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Ford, Richard: The Granta Book of the American Short Story
Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India
Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections
Franzen, Jonathan: How To Be Alone
Gallagher, Mia: Hellfire
Gardam, Jane: Old Filth
Gray, Simon: Smoking Diaries
Hamilton, Hugo: The Speckled People
Hawthorn, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Hemmingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Holtby, Winifred: South Riding
Homer: The Illiad
Homes, AM: This Book Will Save Your Life
Hornby, Nick: Juliet Naked
Hosseini, Khaled: The Kite Runner
Irving, John: A Prayer For Own Meany
Ibsen, Henrik: A Dolls House
Joyce, James: Dubliners
Joyce, James: Ulysses
Kafka, Franz: The Trial
Karr, Mary: The Liar’s Club
Kennedy, AL: Day
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mocking-Bird
Llosa, Mario Vargas: The Feast of the Goat
McCann, Colum: Dancer
McGahern, John: Memoir
Monk Kidd, Sue: The Secret Life of Bees
Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
Cruise O’Brien, Maire: The Same Age as the State
Obama, Barrack: Dreams of My Father
O’Connor, Joseph: Star of the Sea
O’Connor, Joseph: Ghost Light
Orwell, George: 1984
Plunkett, James: Strumpet City
Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News
Raisin, Ross: God’s Own Country
Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
Rubenfeld, Jed: The Interpretation of Murder
Roth, Philip: The Plot Against America
Salinger, JD: Catcher in the Rye
Sebold, Alice: The Lovely Bones
Smith, Zadie: On Beauty
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: The Gulag Archipelgo
Stephens, James: The Crock of Gold
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath
Stockett, Katherine: The Help
Swift, Graham: Last Orders
Tartt, Donna: The Goldfinch
Thackeray, William M: Vanity Fair
Toibin, Colm: Brooklyn
Toibin, Colm: The Master
Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
Tomalin, Claire: Charles Dickens: A Life
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
William, Trevor,: Felicia’s Journey
William, Trevor,: Love and Summer
Trollope, Anthony: Barchester Toweres
Voltaire: Candide
Voynich Ethel: The Gadfly
Williams, John: Stoner
Williams, Niall: History of the Rain
Wolff, Tobias: Old School
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz: Shadow of the Wind
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
On balance, most of us loved it. Some of us ended up thinking, if not talking, in Spanish syntax. The raw honesty of the book. The complex characterisation. The reader’s desire to know what happened at the end. The butchery of war – no matter what side you’re on. And yet how life can be lived in three days. A powerful, extraordinary book.
Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
In a word, we hated it. All of us. Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, some felt, started well; although one sharp member had the book rumbled by page three. Could seven million people be wrong? Eh, yes.
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Our next meeting is on Monday 5th April, Easter Monday, at 7 p.m. at the Newgrange Hotel, Navan. This month we’re reading Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. You are welcome to join us.
Wise Owl Book Club
The Wise Owl book club – by far the finest and most convivial book club in this part of the Milky Way – meets at the Newgrange Hotel, Navan, County Meath, once a month, generally on a Monday evening at 7 p.m. If you love books and tend more towards Anna Karenina and Hemingway than chic lit, then we’d love to see you! For further details, email editor@joearmstrong.ie