3 minute read
get your teeth into these!
NWR has two groups for book lovers, the Postal Book Group and the Online Book Group. If you fall into this category, as a great many of us do, why not join? Book Groups co-ordinator Catharine Woodliffe explains how they work.
Postal Book Group
Advertisement
This has been going for nearly 40 years, and I have been running it since 2012. Sadly, membership is dropping but it has such a lot to offer, it would be a pity to see such a long-established group fold.
How does the Postal Book Group work?
The Postal Book Group year starts at the beginning of April. Members choose a book, of any genre, which they think others would enjoy. I send out a circle of names with an arrow pointing to the person you are to post your book to each month. Send the book together with an A6 notebook for members to write their comments, putting your name address in both book and notebook just in case they go missing in the post, which does not happen very often. The only advice I give is to choose a book which is still in print and which uses a good size of text, for those of us who are getting older!
When you receive your book, write any comments you have in the notebook which comes with it. On the 1st of each month, post both book and notebook on to the next person. This will continue until you receive your own book back at the end of the reading year. If all goes to plan, you will have read 12 books over the year!
At the end of the year I circulate a list of the books which you have read and ask you to rank your top three. I then allocate three marks for first choice, two marks for second and one mark for third, and then inform the members of the overall winners.
Online Book Group
The second group we offer is the Online Book Group, which started in August 2021, and we have just started our fifth series. We meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 2.30pm to 4pm. As well as discussing the set book for the month, we recommend other books which we have read.
At our last meeting, we chose our books until November. If you would like to join us, look out for details in the Your NWR Week Ahead newsletter, or go to www.eventstop.co.uk and search for NWR Online Book Group. You can then book your place for the discussions you would like to take part in. There are 12 places per meeting, including me. I send out the link to the meeting a week in advance, and a reminder the day before or the morning of the meeting. Please consider joining, we would love to welcome you to one of our reading families!
If you feel you would be interested, please email me at postalbookgroup. nwr@gmail.com with your address and telephone number, and I will send you more detailed instructions. If you are not on email, then please contact the office, who will pass on your details to me. If postage is required, I can ask for three stamped addressed envelopes per year for communications to be sent out to you. Occasionally I will ask for a voluntary contribution to help towards my printing costs.
To join the Postal Book Group, email postalbookgroup.nwr@gmail.com
May to July bookings for the Online Book Group can be found here: https://www.eventstop.co.uk/ event/5338/onlinebgmaytojuly#/ or go to www.eventstop.co.uk and enter NWR Online Book Group to find later dates.
Below: Some of the Online Book Group choices still to come in 2023 travelled too far from our teenage selves to recall just what it was like? Atwood herself, in her introduction to the book, refers to its “self-indulgent grotesqueries being attributable to her own youth” which perhaps partly explains why we failed to like it.
In our group, it is unusual for so many to give up on a book. Those who had, said they found it boring and uninspiring with unbelievable characters, “boring as heck food obsessions”, and that it was a kind of “chick-lit”—a teenage book.
On the positive side, the book did inspire some interesting discussions, for instance about contraception in the 60s and how it was then very new, and how much it eventually changed life for women. We also noted how, as a conflicted young woman, Marian’s eating disorder was her inner self sabotaging her marriage plans—the panic attacks and fight or flight conundrums were pretty convincing—and how much less mollycoddled we were back then. We reflected that society conditioned women to feel they had little choice. In 1980, Margaret Atwood said that in the early 1960s the options for young women were “a career going nowhere or marriage as an exit from it” and we felt that the book did reflect that very well. We agreed that there were “odd bits that showed promise”! Thank goodness Margaret went on to do much better.
