Bibliobabes has eleven members although at any given meeting we have around eight in attendance, but this January meeting we had ten of the eleven. Petra, our fearless organizer and leader, encouraged a group photograph to celebrate the New Year and the occasion.
In honor of one of the characters in Jude the Obscure, Drusilla, the baker, I served an all bread refreshment, with banana bread, a lemon cream cheese filled pastry with cinnamon apple topping, a wonderful hot Parmesan cheese casserole bread and fresh rolls as crescents, cinnamon rolls and rolls with butter and jam. There was herbal tea and hot cider to wash it down with.
I thought that Jude the Obscure was by far the darkest of all the Hardy books that I had read, and I expected there to be a lot of antagonism about it, but because Hardy is good at characterization and because he is deep in his own way, there was a surprisingly upbeat discussion about the book and its characters and no one said they out-right hated the book. In the meantime there were a few crazy moments, especially when a large segment of the table broke out in a lively version of Hey Jude by the Beatles.
Bookworms has eight members and six of them were present. This is a very companionable group and I especially enjoy the comments of the members. Everyone is very gracious about the book choices and we tend to safe books. However, we don’t hold back on the endings in the event that someone hasn’t read to the end, and we did have to share with one member that sweet Nell does die in the end, although one keeps hoping that she will get back to London somehow.
Bookworms is a slightly more staid group, so there was no boisterous singing but they, too, had good and positive things to say about The Old Curiosity Shop even though it was LONG. Dickens had some great asides, particularly one about conscience, where he describes it as being very elastic in some people. We spent some time talking about that.
I’m glad that book clubs are a part of my life.
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