femiliterate

We’ve been a bit slow getting started this year but better late than never!

To refresh your memories, we finished last year on the dark and brooding note of Dracula…a creepy classic where we found interesting insights into Victorian notions of masculinity and femininity (remember wonderful Madam Mina? She has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart!)

Moving into 2010, and without further ado! Our first meeting for this year will be on:

• Thursday the 15th July, 7:30pm
• At Kylie’s new lush pad! Her address is 3/42 Flinton st, Paddington
• BYO drinks and book

Below are options for the next book club catch up (you may recognise some as being on previous voting lists) You have till THIS COMING MONDAY (31st May) to vote for your choice and you only have one (1) vote. Get to it!

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi girls

Here it is – the book selection for the third book club. Thanks for all your contributions and enthusiasm. Looking forward to a fab night on the 5th November!

And your selections are: Read the rest of this entry »

Breath by Tim Winton – 2009 – paperback – 276 pages – $21.51 from Fishpond.com.au

For all those feminines who couldn’t make it to our first book club meeting, we missed you but we had a good night meeting each other and discussing “Home” by Marilynne Robinson.

Lindy gave a very enthusiastic summary of the book which then brought us to considering what ‘home’ means to each of us – was it somewhere to escape, a haven where one could return, or was home where we found love/friends/acceptance?

Is it a geographical place or a state of being?

At this stage, I had had too much champagne (as I was the only one drinking it) and became animated discussing I don’t know what!

All this was helped along by a cosy fire, extra spicy wasabi peas, tea, and a splash of wine here and there (A special mention to Rachael at this point for sticking to her guns during Dry July. Well done Rache!)

It was a fun night and Lindy and I sat talking in front of the fire for another hour about the novel after everyone had left. We both were touched by the same passage of beautiful Robinsonian prose where Glory is cutting her aged father’s hair:

“His hair…was so fine, so white and weightless, that it eddied into soft curls…The nape of his neck, the backs of his ears. The visible strain of holding the great human head upright for decades and decades…At the end of so much effort, the neck seemed frail, but the head was still lifted up, and the ears stood there, shaped for attention, soft as they were. She’d have left all that lovely hair, which looked like gentle bewilderment, just as the lifted head and the ears looked like waiting grown old, like trust grown old.” (p.169)

Upon finishing Home, we all decided at the end of the evening that our next book should be Breath by Tim Winton – yes, we may have a fondness for the single word/single syllable title, but this is a total change of literary style.

Winton’s prose is raw, gritty and simplistic. He’s Australian, and when it comes to writing he doesn’t mess around.

Here is a short plot description from The First Tuesday Book Club of Breath: Read the rest of this entry »

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Hi everyone – thanks to those who voted for our first book choice. We’re going to be reading and talking about HOME by Marilynne Robinson so go out and grab yourself a copy and get into it!

I’ve had a look around and the cheapest online retailers are fishpond.com.au who sell the hardback for $33.50 plus $6 for next day delivery although shipping is free if you order over $50.

Borders, Dymocks and the like are selling the book for around $45 hardcover – it seems paperback isn’t out yet?!

In order to whet your appetite, here is an interview with the author about the book.

If you have some interest in the woman behind the book (which you should!) and while you’re waiting for your book to arrive, then it’s really worth reading this Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson. Marilynne discusses, among other things:

• Her latest book Home and its companion-book Gilead
• religion and faith – I was surprised to find she is a Christian but not one bound by rules or limited by judgements
• the environment – she’s angry about how fish farming is emptying the seas to placate our politically correct need for omega 3
• science – she finds Dawkins rather simplistic in a mysterious, uncontainable world
• time – and how she manages to command it
• teaching – and how it keeps her from the despair of writing and being a hermit

These topics are woven into her honest responses that I found completely refreshing, and, in places beautiful in description. She’s passionate and intellectual but not at all pretentious. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome ladies to the first post from the Femi-Literate book club!

Our first meeting will be on Thursday 2nd of July 8pm-10pm at Lindy and Jo’s place at 2 Violet St, Bronte

This is what we plan to do:

• we will meet at the pre-determined spot
• there we will talk about The Book we have just read
• we will drink wine
• we will eat cheese and other nice foods
• we will laugh and sometimes shriek
• we may talk a bit about men
• we will talk about other books we may have read
• we will talk about the next book we should all read
• we will go home happy

Vote – Read – Talk – Drink!

The main purpose of this post is to present you with some reading options for the First Book to be discussed at our July meeting.

Have a read through the options below and register your vote at the bottom.

Voting will close midday this coming Monday (1st June) – check the website for the result! Read the rest of this entry »