This month the group read the 2008 Booker prize winner, The White Tiger by Aravid Adiga. Overall the group “really enjoyed this book” , despite “finding a lot of sadness in it.” The story telling was remarkably vivid and one reading group member described it as ”a semi parable”. The following review by Adam Lively from The [...]
Filed under: Awards, Book review, Crime, Culture, Death, Forest Hill reading group, Postcolonial, Racism | Leave a Comment »
Share your love of reading with others on Sunday 26 June at Manor House Library. Authors, Claire Seeber and Chrissie Gittins, will be helping Lewisham celebrate National Reading Group Day from 11am-1.30pm. Claire Seeber has used her background in journalism and TV documentaries to inform her psychological crime thrillers. Chrissie Gittins writes poetry for adults, [...]
Filed under: Blackheath reading group, Book event, Culture, Forest Hill reading group, Lewisham crime reading group, Lewisham reading group, Manor House Latin-American Reading and Film Group, Manor House reading group, Manor House Saturday reading group, New Cross reading group | Leave a Comment »
This month we read Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters, a biography of Stuart Shorter who was a homeless man and advocate. In 1998, following a five-year jail sentence for armed robbery, Stuart’s life reached its lowest ebb. Whilst living in a subterranean multi-storey car park, he was rescued by two outreach workers, and was [...]
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Here’s a nice exchange between a Maggie Smith, a member of the FHRG, and Charlie Connelly, author of Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, which was discussed by the group in March. It just goes to show how blogs and email enable quick and easy interraction between writer and reader. Extract from [...]
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It was a ‘thumbs up’ all round for March’s chosen book, Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962 the novel is narrated by three women: Aibileen and Minny are both black maids working for ladies from the cream of white society, while Miss Skeeter is the 23-year-old daughter of one of those [...]
Filed under: America, Book review, Forest Hill reading group, History, Racism, Women | Tagged: Kathryn Stockett | Leave a Comment »
March’s FHRG discussed Charlie Connelly’s travel log Attention All Shipping where the author sets off to explore the furthest reaches of the Radio 4 shipping forecast. There remains a great charm and poetry to the forecast which, since its first broadcast in 1911, has become a fixture of British radio. There’s great comfort to be [...]
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To celebrate World Book Night 2011, Forest Hill library will taking part in the largest book give-away ever attempted. This dynamic and unprecedented initiative to celebrate adult books and reading will see one million free books given away on World Book Night by 20,000 passionate readers to other members of the public across the UK [...]
Filed under: Book event, Book review, Culture, Forest Hill reading group, Poetry | Tagged: World Book Night | Leave a Comment »
The Forest Hill reading group has produced a book list for first half of 2011: January - The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver February - Collected Poems by T.S.Eliot March – The Help by Kathryn Stockett April - Attention all Shipping by Charlie Connelly May - The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry June - Indian Summer by a selction of Asian writers July - Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander [...]
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Even in its incomplete form, Suite Française is one of those rare books that demands to be read. This was to be a novel written in five sections, dealing with France under German occupation. Irene Nemirovsky had envisaged that the book would be a thousand pages long: an ironic reference to the German fantasy of [...]
Filed under: Forest Hill reading group, Holocaust, War | Tagged: Irene Nemirovsky | 1 Comment »
With the summer holidays upon us, we were few in number at the latest Forest Hill Reading Group meeting. This didn’t impact on the conversation however and up for discussion was Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany, Egyptian author of the widely read book The Yacoubian Building. Aswany tells a decent story, most of the way, and he spins and juggles quite [...]
Filed under: Culture, Forest Hill reading group, Politics | Tagged: Alaa al Aswany | 1 Comment »
