Friday, May 10, 2013

Bluestocking Bookclub 2013



From mid-2013 Bluestocking is running a bimonthly Bookclub. We’ll post up the books 1-2 months in advance and invite everyone to a discussion session at a café on a Sunday morning over coffee. New book suggestions are more than welcome!

The first Bluestocking Bookclub get-together will be on Sunday June 9th at 9:30am at Cranked café in Leederville. The books to read are: Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior’ and Alice Munroe’s ‘Lives of Girls and Women’. Read either of these books- or both if you’re feeling adventurous – and come along on the 9th for some discussion, coffee/tea and a bit of fun.



Details:
9:30am Sunday 9th June
Cranked café at 106 Oxford St, Leederville
RSVP here by Monday 3rd June
See below for more information on the books, and post your own comments about the books!
  

Flight Behavior
by Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world. …

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.”

“Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro

[A]n insightful, honest book, ‘autobiographical in form but not in fact’, that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women- her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopaedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.”