Tag Archives: Book club

First Drafts

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Books, Writing

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One of the unexpected pleasures of the Private Eye subscription I gave my husband for his birthday (there’s nothing a present you’re going to enjoy yourself) is their books pages.  There are wonderfully un-sycophantic reviews, literary gossip, and cartoons including a brilliant series called First Drafts which most writers are going to be able to relate to in one way or the other.

I find first drafts murder anyway, as I get older and more and more critical they’re harder and harder to write and description is particularly difficult.  I was trying to discover what sort of state a body would be in after it had been buried in the sandy soil of Les Landes for a few weeks so I could use adjectives other than ‘disgusting’ and ‘stomach churning’ when I saw this:

Since I really don’t fancy asking French officialdom about corpses, ‘But why do you want to know this Madame Corby?  Perhaps you’d like to help us with our enquiries…’ doing this is so tempting.

Several years ago my book club nearly had a riot over reading Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with at least one member threatening to resign if we ever had another book by Scott.  We’d all agree that Scott’s many books would have been much improved if he’d taken the hint below:

I wish I’d seen it when doing the book bunting for the Book Club 10th birthday party, it would have gone nicely alongside the cover of Ivanhoe.

And no, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey but Susie has and apparently it’s quite something.  Naturally I don’t know what this refers to but I’m sure all of those who spent two days glued to the sofa (even if they won’t admit it) know exactly what this is all about..

Book Bunting

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Books

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Warning, blowing of own trumpet follows.

My book club is having a party to celebrate its 10th anniversary this week and I thought that a book club party should have lots of book type decorations so I offered to make some bunting with pictures of the covers of the books we’ve read over the last ten years.

It took a lot longer than I rather hopefully thought it would, it can be quite difficult finding decent pictures of the covers on the internet, I had to give up on Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate as all the images were desperately blurred, but I have to say I think I did a jolly good job.

Here they are hung up in my husband’s office so I can admire my handiwork.  They really do look even better in real life.

There’s a total of 79 covers up there, we’ve actually read 98 books but I couldn’t download some, I loathed a couple so much I refused to include them (the creator’s privilege), some of the covers were downright boring and I accidentally cut Atonement in half.  I have included the book club’s most loathed book – Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott which prompted one member to threaten to resign if we ever had a book like that again.

The Eyre Affair was not a success, one member said, ‘It’s got a Dodo in it and Dodos don’t exist…’

Moon Tiger had a very mixed reception as did Lucia, Lucia but everyone loved The Next Step In The Dance.  Great cover too.

This one is for the door as everyone comes in.  The middle two books, The Girl With A Pearl Earring was the first book we read, and Guernica was our book last week.

Now off to make book related place cards for the lunch…