Book Group…

Plenty of food for thought there. Will come back to it shortly.

So yesterday we had lots of playdough and drawing and painting, they watched Peter Pan and role played at being Wallace & Gromit, Peter Pan & Tinkerbell (which included dressing up) and played with the megabloks, dolls and k’nex. So plenty of boxes ticked there 🙂

I did indeed manage to clear off the whole of the bookshelf which resulted in the two lists posted below and a far more acceptable view of the bookcase which I can see from my normal sofa in the lounge. I also set the printer up to run from the laptop so that’s useful – still can’t get the network connection to behave mind you which is very annoying when trying to IM with someone!

The children were back to normal healthwise really and Davies returned to his usual volume of Very High. Those of you who have spent any time with him will no doubt be aware of what I mean, he is ineffably loud… normally I can either zone him out or encourage him to play out of earshot but I was grateful to the children for keeping out of the way while I managed all the phonecalls this morning so I let them carry on and so consequently had a splitting headache by the time Ady arrived home. 🙁

Managed to update him on the phonecalls, sort the kids tea out which they were esuirent for, cut Davies’ hair and trim a fringe back into Tarly’s so she at least looks less wild from the front, bath them and still get out of the house in time for the first meeting of the new book group at the local library.

Now I had this vague plan of dressing the part – I was going to wear my glasses, hair up, long swirly skirt, little cardi – that sort of thing 😉 But didn’t manage it so the best I could pull off was a clean top (old one had soup splashes and lots of Davies’ hair all over it) and some lip gloss before leaving.

I think there were 13 of us in total. I was by far the youngest, probably by a decade at least. There was a retired bloke who writes poetry and spoke about this at length, at every given opportunity. I need to ensure I never get sat next to him as the poor unfortunates on either side of him were leant towards with asides and comments every time someone spoke. He kept butting in and the first few times everyone listened but eventually we gave up and just kept talking. There were a group of 3 women who came together – career women types, two of whom had teenage children. Two retired women, one very glam and loud and one very plain and quiet, a married couple in their 40s, quite hippyish but very articulate and a couple of other women.

I actually felt very out of my depth really – I tend to read frothy, trashy books rather than anything too challenging. I remember reading that 100 reads that spawned all the reading blogs and being horrified that despite reading a lot I am not very well read. Ady and I were talking about the difference between being intelligent and being educated the other day and this was a perfect example of the difference for me.

To be honest I went along mainly because I happened to see it advertised when I called into the library last week and the book being discussed tonight was My Sister’s Keeper which several of us read during the summer and I had spent a fair bit of time thinking about and chatting to others about afterwards. I have also since read several more of her books and although I could possibly be critical of whether or not they are beatifully written I have enjoyed the challenge to my ideas that each of them has offered. I also went along because I was very curious about what actually does happen at a book group!

Now, it’s not often I put myself in situations where I feel uncomfortable and I don’t actually remember the last time I felt shy or decided that shutting up and listening would be preferable to talking and possibly embarassing myself but as I did sit there feeling like a little kid in a room of grown ups (not entirely unpleasant being 32 now and all!) and was very aware that these were mostly people who devour books like sweets and were tossing words about like ‘Classics’ ‘Dickensian’ ‘genre’ and ‘beautifully crafted’ I felt I had little to add to the conversation. I did speak confidently when it was my turn to discuss the JC book – I had most of them nodding along with what I was saying, I made at least one of them concede a point about the purpose of the book and reading in general and two of the people who spoke after me said ‘well I agree with Nicola’ (yes, it was definitely a place to be Nicola, not Nic! Infact I should probably have been someone far more exotic like Philomena actually), so all was not lost!

I didn’t contribute to the discussion about recommending books for the next few groups, mainly because all of the books I have read and enjoyed have either been made into motion pictures or have brightly coloured covers and are about women who spend too much, have holiday romances, are single but get the guy in the end or involve them having a baby, adjusting to that new state with comic effect and then managing to run a successful business, meet new friends who support and love them and having a fantastic marriage too. Hardly the right sort of fodder to be pulled apart for deeper meaning and character analysis by the people in that room!

The woman who runs all the book groups for the district came along and chatted about how it would all work, gave us a goody bag with a book, a book readers magazine and a voucher for free dvd borrowing from the library and then headed off. She mentioned just how many books are published each year and of course sitting in a library crammed with them brought that home nicely.

So, it will be a couple of hours during an evening once a month. My plan is to give it 3 books – so 3 months. Unless I have a 2 out of 3 hit rate of having gotten something out of the reading of the books I will give up and decide that actually I’m far better off sticking to what I know. I don’t want it to feel like homework – one of the chief reasons that we’re HEing is that I want the children to develop a love and passion for learning things rather than viewing them as work so if it starts to become a chore for me then I will leave it. But weird mix of people, book snobbery and indeed my own dubiety aside I think it might just be something I end up loving.