“Who you get, and how it works out — there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching
consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle
it if it turns out unhappily.”
This week's book is Enduring Love by Ian McEwan and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and
the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who
aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”
This week's book is The Collector by John Fowles and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
As we're coming to the end of our reading list, we'll be pitching books at the meeting. You may like to consider the unread books list and the unreadable books list.
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from
birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a
medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor
precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch
in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”
This week's book is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
As we're coming to the end of our reading list, we'll be pitching books at the meeting. You may like to consider the unread books list and the unreadable books list.
“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s
existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is
impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.”
“The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter
thereafter, and came and passed again.”
This week's books are Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad The Man Who Would be King by Rudyard Kipling and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they
have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And
this is one: I'm going to tell it — but take care not to smile at any part of it.”
This week's book is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“... the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you
have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They
don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They
are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end,
yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you
live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who
doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.”
This week's book is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost
idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his
yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing
exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His
political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”
This week's book is It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
“How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead
gestures of dolls.”
This week's book is As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“I take it that ‘gentleman’ is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but
when we speak of him as ‘a man’ , we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow men, but in
relation to himself, — to life — to time — to eternity. A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe — a
prisoner immured in a dungeon for life — nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his
strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as ‘a man’. I am rather weary of this word
‘gentlemanly’ which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often too with such
exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun ‘man’, and the adjective
‘manly’ are unacknowledged.”
This week's book is North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it” wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, and chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion, and clarity, describing with bitter intensity the bright hopes and cynical betrayals of that chaotic episode: the revolutionary euphoria of Barcelona, the courage of ordinary Spanish men and women he fought alongside, the terror and confusion of the front, his near-fatal bullet wound and the vicious treachery of his supposed allies.
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
This week's book is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“Good. Proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob.”
This week's book is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear,
the fear of failure and of weakness.
It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of
the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.
Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.”
This week's book is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then
I would remember that it had already happened.”
This week's book is The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“‘Hunting’s like adultery,’ he said. ‘Endless hanging about, interspersed with frenzied moments of
excitement, very expensive and morally indefensible.’”
To celebrate St Valentine's day, we'll be reading the first in Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronices.
This week's book is Riders by Jilly Cooper and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”
This week's book is Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in order to hunt down the traitor at the very heart of the Circus — even though it may be one of those closest to him.
This week's book is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré and we'll be meeting at The Didsbury on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.
Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against
the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil. Hoping to
protect his family, he joins the Russians, who accept him but never put their trust in him — and so
Murat must find another way to end the struggle.
This week's book is Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy and we'll be meeting at Ye Olde Cocke on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.