It was Donna Brown’s birthday (congratulations!), and before our book discussion we all enjoyed a piece of traditional cake from the region—although I can’t remember its name. Masako brought homemade sushi and Japanese snacks for the occasion. We read A Pale View of Hills by the Nobel Prize laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, a British author of Japanese origin.

Our Book Club members all gathered this past Monday at Anne’s home to discuss the book, The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, by Swedish author Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg. The main characters in the book were a group of elderly residents of a senior facility named the Diamond House who were all most unhappy at cost-saving changes making their lives much less enjoyable.

It was, once again, wonderful to see each other. Before the Book Blub evening had fully begun, a few people had already shared their opinions about A Heart So White by Spanish author Javier Marías. Their facial expressions already revealed a lot about how they felt about the book. We were all looking forward to the discussion, because when people have strong opinions about a book, it always makes for an interesting conversation.

We had a wonderful start to our new season with the first Book Club meeting of the club year. There was a great turn out, filled with book club regulars as well as some new faces who joined for the first time. We discussed Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which gave us a lot to talk about.

The book is a thriller/mystery, which on the surface explores the relationship between a female journalist, Rika, and her subject, Manako Kajii, a woman accused of murdering multiple former lovers.

This time the dedicated TIC book club members ventured in the rain to a nearby village of Alphen to discuss a piece of Scandinavian noir, “In the month of the midnight sun” by Cecilia Ekbäck. Joined by some new faces, the book clubbers were eager to go over their reading experiences. Luckily most had finished the book, because it was impossible to avoid spoilers about the surprising plot twists in the last quarter of the book!

Four TIC members and one guest braved the damp and chilly weather to meet at Anne’s to discuss Miss Emily, by Irish author Nuala O’Connor. The book is primarily set around 1865  in the Massachusetts home of American Poet Emily Dickinson. There is a crisis at the start of the novel – the Dickinson household is without a maid, so the mother and 2 daughters have to do all the housekeeping and kitchen duties.

The discussion of the Booker Prize-winning book Timeshelter, written by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, was interesting and full of questions. On one hand, the book has a philosophical side, contemplating the subject of memory loss and how our identity is intertwined mostly with the times when we were younger and happier. For this reason, it was not enjoyed as much by the younger members of the book club, who are practically living in these times now, while older members enjoyed the reflections on time, memory, and the past more, as they could relate to them.

The Book Club met at Donna Brown’s apartment on December 19^th, with a good group in attendance just prior to the holidays. The group all agreed that the fictionalized biography of anthropologist Margaret Mead was well written, though the majority did find the character of Fen quite offensive.  There was considerable discussion about the value of researching primitive cultures, as that was Nell’s (Margaret Mead) work and how anyone doing so has to be prepared to immerse oneself to do so.