The Book Stripped Bare
is it real, is it a dream?
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
POEM OF THE MONTH....brought to you by Carol Ann Duffy
by Carol Ann Duffy from The World's Wife
'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed ...'(from Shakespeare's will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
Monday, 30 May 2011
The first book group field trip and the books for June
In the meantime please read the 2 books for June
Thursday, 12 May 2011
2 months for the price of 1
Thursday, 31 March 2011
March/april book(s)
Just a mini update. April 16th wetherspoons @ Bank circa 18:00. Prerequisite for attendance: having read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and/or Number9dream by David Mitchell.
Walking down the Crow Road
Firstly a belated thanks are in order for one of our new members. Thanks Sarah for your excellent hosting of the Scottish themed Iain Banks evening. An enjoyable read all round featuring a few extra special moments of morse code related joy!
Once we were all sufficiently stuffed of haggis, neeps and tatties (ok maybe Scottish shortbread, but we made the effort), the discussion revolved around the humour used and the themes of class and 'scottishness' that were prevalent throughout the novel.
All of us admitted that the book was very funny in places. The Crow Road is ultimately a mystery and coming of age novel rolled into one. The story was very dark and filled with black humour, death, loneliness and fragmented families. Prentice, the lead character, spent the novel estranged from his atheist father who was disappointed when Prentice 'rebelled' and discovered religion. Banks clearly used the novel to play around with more traditional Scottish views. Thatcherism, mostly a loathing of it, is also explored. The vivid descriptions of rural Scotland are littered with images of forgotten and abandoned industries.
The novel flicks between the generations of the central characters, that was a little hard to get used to but all made sense towards the end. Some of the group felt that the pace of the novel was a bit too slow through the middle.
The ending? Probably as happy and rounded an ending as you could expect from a novel as dark as The Crow Road is. I will leave out any references to the morse code sex scene as I can't type when I'm cringing.
What we liked:
The descriptions of Scotland
The importance of floppy discs
The humour
What we didn't like:
The pointless younger brother
The way the story of the father was developed
The morse code scene (or did we secretly love it?)
Monday, 7 February 2011
Ach ay' canny we read thi? - Iain Banks
Who knows, if this goes well maybe Trainspotting next? I have to admit reading in the vernacular is one of my favourite things to do. Anyway, early reports about the novel are very positive, we are meeting on Friday 25th Feb, at the usual haunt.
Until then, lets get reading peoples...the countdown clock has started.