We had a change of venue for this book group meeting, Le Bon Ton on Gips St in Abbotsford. It was a warm but rainy night and after starting off at the front of the bar, we moved out the back under the cover of an awning. It wasn't a bad place but there was something about that felt strange to me. The coronavirus was in the offing and there was a bit of social distancing and just a leery wonder at what the future might hold; maybe the staff were a bit standoff-ish.
Everyone loved the book – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – but the discussion was skittish and fragmented. I wanted to talk a lot about it, I'd read it as a teenager and I don't think I'd really "got" the deeper themes in the book, the impotence of agency that comes with complete outside control of one's life, the strictures of social strata. But the conversation jumped around and was good but didn't really stick to the book.
Mark had bought along a couple of books and we (almost too easily) picked one of them, My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. The blurb on the cover looked good and the page length – ~100 – sealed the deal. Hope to see people at The All Nations next month but who knows what will happen.
