The Book Club
We have been running our Book Club since April 2006. We meet once a month in the evening on the second Tuesday. Currently we have 10 members. Membership is open to all members of Rochdale Inner Wheel Club. Our debates are lively, sometimes loud, sometimes hilarious. Not to be missed.
Each member chooses a book for discussion in turn. We read 10 books a year and our only difficulty is making the final choice. In January and August, we go out to dinner - December is too taken up with impending festivities to read and August finds many of us on the beach.
In 2006, we kicked off with Carol Shields' last novel, Unless, revisted Brideshead (sorry) and then tried Dart a long narrative poem by Alice Oswald. We quickly established that what we really like is novels of the past 30 years or so,although we have tried non fiction eg Dear friend and gardener letters of Beth Chatto and Christopher Dixon and A seven year hitch the story of a family's global travels in a horse drawn caravan.
Surprisingly, a lot of the novels have been set in Venice - Stones Fall (a club favourite),The Comfort of Strangers, City of falling angels, The Glassblower of Murano . And a lot have a background of conflict - The cellist of Sarajawevo, A Farewell to arms, Bird Song, The Glass Palace, The Guernesy Literary and Potato Peel Society, Last Train from Liguria, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul.
We do humour too - Lucky Jim, The Uncommon Reader, Taking Apart the Poco Poco. Some writers have had more than one visit - Khaled Hosseini, Rose Tremaine, Victoria Hislop, Robert Harris, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Sarah Waters. But David Mitchell did not get a second go - not after Cloud Atlas which everyone hated - except me and I chose it and still maintain it will be one of the great books of the century!!
Early offerings for 2023:
February The Bee Keeper of Aleppo, Leftert.
March There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You, Lynda Bellingham
April The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey, Rachel Joyce
May Catherine, Called Birdy, Karen Cushmore