Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe, 29th October

There were quite strong opinions about The 100 Year Old Man.... possibly an equal balance of lovers and haters! Think it depended whether you enjoyed the knowing tone and leftfield telling of 20th century history or thought it was all a bit Forrest Gump and didn't really work.

Book for next time is:

Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe

It was close with excellent pitches for:

To rise again at a decent hour by Joshua Ferris
The Wrong Boy by Willy Russell
A Grain Of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Light Between Oceans by ML Steadman

The Craft Beer Co is not a great winter pub as not much space inside if it's raining. But The King's Head is open again so let's go there. (confusingly now called King and Co but is definitely open http://thekingandco.uk/) 100 Clapham Park Road, SW4 7BZ. On Wednesday 29th October.

And for next time, we agreed to pitch books that engage with the Gothic with a view to going to this exhibition at the British Library
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/gothic/index.html
Most suitable as it'll be nearly Hallowe'en...

Also, there was some Facebook discussion about moving the start time back to 7.30. Have gone for leaving it as 7pm but we won't start talking about the book till at least 7.45pm

Next meeting: The Hundred-Year-Old Man...(9th October)

Sorry for the hiatus in postings to the blog. At some point, can attempt to do some backfill if anyone's interested in what has been read in the intervening months!

Anyway, next meeting we will be talking about The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. On a Thursday...sorry, Wednesday fans - we will return to normal next time.
 
From 7 pm; 9th October, at Craft Beer Co, 128 Clapham Manor Street SW4 6ED

We had a tie for the next book for first time in ages with The Hundred...pipping The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky to the post in a second round of voting. As exciting as the Scottish referendum..

Other books suggested were:
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Hullabalo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai

Last meeting we talked about The Bunker Diary. Not sure we agreed on questions including whether it's too bleak for a YA book, if there's hope in it (as the author claims), how much it's about religion...but maybe that's the point of discussing something!