BOOKS ON THE BROAD

books on the broad

On the first Monday night of the month, I go to Books on the Broad. It’s a ‘reading group’ hosted by Blackwell’s in their bookshop on Broad Street in Oxford. Numbers present have varied between 12 and 20. Last night the age range began, I guess, in the mid-twenties and went upwards from there. Again I guess: probably the majority present are aged 50 or more. Men are in a minority. Just 3 or 4 of us.

The general idea is that during one month we read our ‘set book’ – it’s always a novel – and then we meet on the first Monday of the next month to talk about it. Put like that it looks a strange thing to do. I joined partly to meet a new group of people but more particularly to be led to books I otherwise might not have read. Somehow I suspect it just provides an evening’s entertainment in congenial company for some of those who attend. We meet at 6:30 with an 8 o’clock exit. I find I’m home in time to watch whatever BBC1 has on offer at 9 pm.

I ‘discovered’ the group in June, read the chosen book, and wrote a brief review which I took with me for the first Monday in July. The book was Annie Proulx : The Shipping News which I remembered from the short list for one of the literary Prizes and for a film version I’d seen on the telly a long time back. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book. It seemed to me like the work of someone who’d been to a Creative Writing course to learn how to do it and then diligently applied the lessons she’d learned when she wrote her novel. I was not surprised to find I was in a minority of one so far as Books on the Broad was concerned.

On August 4th, we talked about Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction novel originally in Polish and the book of two films. Another text which didn’t particularly beguile me. Without a self-imposed obligation to read the whole thing, I would never have reached the end. I found it a monotone monologue without a beginning or an ending. It was first published in 1961 (in Poland). I found a sense of an undefined but continual threat lurking in the background and speculated that this was the very real possibility of imminent nuclear war which many people felt in the early 1960s.

And so to last night when we were assumed to be familiar with Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, her first novel (published in 1950). It’s set in southern Africa (where she lived from age 5 until 1949) and is about a youngish single women who was influenced by gossip to get married. It was a disaster which ended only when she was killed. I found the book very well written and have since read two more of hers. The Sweetest Dream (2001) and The Golden Notebook (1962). I found Golden Notebook especially good and quite unlike any novel I’d ever read before. Maybe it can go on our ‘reading list’ sometime in the second half of next year.