BOOK CLUB NEWS

March’s Book club meeting!

March’s meeting is early this month as author of the Postmistress Sarah Blake has agreed to join us and share some of the inspiration behind her wonderful book.

Please RSVP now and keep your RSVP current as space will be limited, and we want everyone to be able to benefit from this amazing opportunity.

RSVP NOW

The book is £4.00 on Amazon BUY IT

Literature Events: 

The London Book Fair 
The London Book Fair is coming to town! Okay, this might not be as exciting for you as it is for me… and it does cost £25.00 to get in but I can’t wait! Let me know if you’re interested in going and we can go together! April 11-13th Earl’s Court , London.
LONDON BOOK FAIR INFO

World BOOK Night
World book night is on Friday night. What organisers believe will be the biggest single literary event in history is to raise the curtain on next month's World Book Night, itself billed as "the biggest book  give-away ever". On 4 March London's Trafalgar Square will be given over to a "glittering celebration of the written word", with 10,000 people expected to attend. Graham Norton will be hosting the event, with readings from Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman (among others). Read more HERE  Tickets to the event are free, but limited. I will let you know when they are on general sale.!

Exclusive Event with celebrated Author Alexander McCall Smith
Date: 03 March 2011
Time: 1PM – 3:30 PM
Place: The Royal Geological Society, Piccadilly, London
Price: £15 ( proceeds will go to support The Pelican Post)
Booking: To Reserve a place please email events@pelican-post.org
MORE INFORMATION

The books that have defined the London Girly Book Club (to date)

Title	Author
Change of Heart	Jodi Picoult
Three Cups of Tea	Greg Mortensen
Purple Hibiscus	Ghimimanda Ngozi Adichie
Glass Castle	Jeanette Walls
Marley & Me	John Grogan
Open House	Elizabeth Berg
The Gift	Cecelia Ahearn
Shantaram	Gregory David Roberts
Double Blind	Chris Bohjalian
Sarabande	Marcus Fedder
Twilight	Stephanie Myers
Passion	Louise Bagshawe
The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society	Mary Ann Shaffer
White Tiger	Aravind Adiga
Call in the Midwife	Jennifer Worth
Half Broke Horses	Jeanette Walls
Still Alice	Lisa Genova
We Need to talk about Kevin	Lionel Shaffer
The Various Flavours of Coffee	Anthony Capella
Stones into Schools	Greg Mortensen
The Help	Kathryn Stockett
The Other Hand	Chris Cleaves
Single in the City	Michele Gorman
The Legacy	Katherine Webb
The Last Lecture	Randy Pausch
One Day	David Nicholls
The Postmistress	Sarah Blake

Women's Lit: The novels that defined 20th-century woman.

From Stylist Magazine

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin. 1899. "Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life." A wife and mother begins asking herself difficult questions in this landmark work of proto-feminism.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. 1929. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” An eloquent extended essay railing against the inevitable strictures of a patriarchal society.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. 1963. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. Semi-autobiographical novel about a young writer who tries, and eventually refuses, to fit in.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Anais Nin. 1966. “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Seven volumes of unconventional wisdom and liberal sexuality from one of the 20^th century’s most inspiring thinkers.

The Colour Purple, by Alice Walker. 1982. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Pulitzer-winning novel dealing in racial and sexual oppression.

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson. 1985. “Love has been diluted into paperback form and sole thousands and millions of copies.” Ground-breaking coming-of-age novel exploring religious and sexual repression.

The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf. 1991. “Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.” Academic yet palatable argument that the pressure to conform to an invented ideal of “beauty” is a means of controlling women.

The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler. 1996. “Just say c**t! Everything changes.” Episodic play dealing with rape, incest, pleasure and pain.

Vote for February's Book Choice!!!

Vote above for February's book! 

One Day by David Nicholls 

‘I can imagine you at forty,’ she said, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘I can picture it right now.’ He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Go on then.’

15th July 1988. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year which follows?

One Day is a funny/sad love story spanning twenty years, a book about growing up – how we change, how we stay the same. 

‘One Day is a wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad. It’s also, with its subtly political focus on changing habits and mores, the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up. – John O’Connell, The Times.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

It is 1940, and bombs fall nightly on London. In the thick of the chaos is young American radio reporter Frankie Bard. She huddles close to terrified strangers in underground shelters, and later broadcasts stories about survivors in rubble-strewn streets. But for her listeners, the war is far from home. Listening to Frankie are Iris James, a Cape Cod postmistress, and Emma Fitch, a doctor’s wife. Iris hears the winds stirring and knows that soon the letters she delivers will bear messages of hope or tragedy. Emma is desperate for news of London, where her husband is working – she counts the days until his return. But one night in London the fates of all three women entwine when Frankie finds a letter – a letter she vows to deliver . . .

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. 

is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.

Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. 

Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney

and the WINNER is....

SYDNEY HILL!!!

Well done Sydney, who's read the most books off the BBC book list. She's getting a copy of something a touch less high brown than the books she's obviously been reading! Chick Lit!!!

Book Recommendations Anyone?

If you have a book recommendation then please comment below. If your book is chosen as this month's read then you'll receive the book for free! Please feel free to add as many recommendations as you like. We'll try and get through them all. We support all sorts of genres including non-fiction.

The Big Read!

BBC booklist: Apparently the average Brit has only read 6... how many have you read?!Prize to whomever has read the MOST books! Submit your answer to londongbclub@gmail.com

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -  2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -  5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -  8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy- 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald- 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens – 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - 34 Emma - Jane Austen - 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - 52 Dune - Frank Herbert - 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck- 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov- 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson- 75 Ulysses - James Joyce - 76 The Inferno - Dante - 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - 80 Possession - AS Byatt - 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell  83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur  Conan Doyle - 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams –95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo –