Summer reading reports (5 Feb 2014)

We will be meeting at The Park Hotel, Nicholson St, Abbotsford.

The plan for this meeting is that everyone will give a one minute presentation about one of the books that they've read over the christmas break.

I would like to think that there might be an extraordinary meeting on January 1 but that seems wildly optimistic when I think about the hangovers that we'll all be nursing.

I thought the Royston Hotel was a good choice with a great selection of beers but it didn't really lend itself to our group's needs where we could sit down talking in a quietish environment.

"Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers (4 Dec 2013)

We will be meeting at The Royston Hotel, Richmond at on December 4, 8:00 pm.

Tom's suggestion of Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers was taken up after the usual tossing around of book titles and ideas.  There were a couple of other suggestions:

• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, 2013 Booker prize winner but too long at 800+ pages

Yellow Birds won The Guardian’s inaugural book award, there’s an article about that here.

This will be the last book group meeting for the year.  Edward was proposing that over the christmas break that we should all read different books and then report back to the group about them when we reconvene next year.

"Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" by Philip K Dick (6 Nov 2013)

We will be meeting at The Retreat Hotel, Nicholson St, Abbotsford.

It's great to see the variety of novels that we're reading and this is our first excursion into sci-fi.

This was the basis for the movie Blade Runner (1982).

There's some information about Philip K Dick.  He died in 1982.  I wonder if he got to see the movie? Ah, at the end of the version I read, there was a little blurb about him which said that he died two weeks before the film was released, robbing him of seeing his work reach a broader audience.

Paul sent this link about Philip K Dick.