Very good turnout for the first meeting of the year and lots of people had read the book. In spite of that, it was quite difficult to keep the group focussed on talking about that because everyone wanted to talk about other stuff (which, of course, is fine). The Warden really excelled as a novel of its time, with a lot of description and prose written to be read enjoyably and to revel in its writing. That can become cloying and clumsy but here it works really well. It tells a its story of a man with great conscience who found himself running a hospital with impropriety not of his making and who is then undone by another man who acts, perhaps naively, according to his own conscience.
The next book was chosen with a minimum of fuss, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I was delighted about: I'd always wanted to read the book, it seems to provide such a potent metaphor for all sorts of aspects of our own society.
The next meeting will be at the All Nations as usual.
