Dipping into The Sea

Hi Guys,
It was great to meeting you all in the pub last week. Both Nicola and I have picked up a copy of The Sea and seem to be getting into it, actually quite addictive. In case you are wondering who Nicola is she works at my office and we both met Claire and Victoria last month while out out on the tiles one night...
Bye for now!

What Julian has been reading

I have read some brilliant books lately. The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin was quiet, delicate yet full of suppressed emotion. I found a kindred spirit on this wonderful writer. She lives in Maine across the great pond and I discovered her blog online. We both swooned over this giant Irish talent.

Also read Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai - the mother of Kiran who recently won the Man Booker Prize. Very fine writing in this quite short novel. Beautiful descriptive work. Where was the beauty in Sophie Hannah's Little Face - nowhere to be seen.

Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal was a wonderful suprise for me. It is very down to earth and also an intimate work. Plenty of humour and engages the reader from beginning to end. Its true she doesnt seem to be overly fond of men, nevertheless the women characters are extremely subtly realised.

I tried one of Italo Calvino's works - Invisible Cities - could not get in to this - perhaps it suffers in translation. Maybe its the postmodernism that puts me off. Julian has always been a traditionalist at heart. This for me applies to all the arts. Ok I do like Virginia Woolf very much and she was something of a modernist - however most of her works do preserve narrative sense and character interest - I only found The Waves impossible - could give it another go as that was a long time ago and people change. Mainly I do go for realism in literature, melody in music
and figurative or landscape work in painting


Now reading One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This is also posing problems as it is "magical realist". However there are some stunning passages in it and I am keeping going.

I have been doing some background reading on Marquez and this has helped a bit. He has one hell of a life story. Colombia where he grew up is enough to make anyones writing a bit weird. What a terrible history the country has. No wonder Marquez now spends most of his time in Mexico or Europe. He isnt very popular as a person in the USA because of his Communist sympathies although actually he doesnt write a blank cheque for people like Castro.

This month's book

This month I was super-thrilled to see so many people turn up - including some new people - welcome! We discussed last month's book, Sophie Hannah's psychological thriller, Little Face. Most people thoroughly enjoyed it, finding it entertaining and gripping. However, Lorraine thought it was 'silly' and Julian thought it was terrible, lacking in 'soul'.

This month's shortlist was chosen by Ali, who picked a theme....

The Sea by John Banville
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (this was a cryptic one...)
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

And the winner, in a 2 round thrilling vote, is:

The Sea by John Banville

Happy reading.