Book group style

I think that my fellow book group members would agree that one of our party is extremely stylish. I was particularly struck with her choice of jewellery this evening, and the unusual colour of her dress, as blipped.

It was a fabulous meeting. For the first time in a while all eight of us were together, so it was a busy, lively evening with several simultaneous conversations crossing back and forth across the dinner table on topics that ranged from the practicalities of wired underwear to opera. ArcLight cooked us a marvellous curry feast, including a delicious hake dish.

As I anticipated, All the pretty horses generated some great debate, particularly at my end of the table where four of us discussed it in some detail in advance of an 'all table' analysis. By my calculations, two of us read the whole book (Winsford and I) and two listened to it all as an audio file (Ridgeback13 and LauraMuir). The others didn't manage to finish it, principally because they couldn't get into the narrative. I have to admit that I would have given up on it had it not been a book group choice. 

It's not an easy read due to the unconventional use of sentence structure, punctuation (including apostrophes - grrr), and capitalisation. I was also irritated by the use of Spanish in the text with the meaning inferred (but not confirmed) by context. Added to this, my lack of knowledge of the political history of Mexico was a bit of a hindrance to the understanding of the significance of elements of the plot. I feel that had I listened to the story, I would have appreciated more the beauty of the writing, the main themes of the story (including manhood, violence, class, the collision of old and new worlds), and the plot construction. It's telling that of the four of us who 'consumed' the whole book, the two who did so on Audible enjoyed it the most. I don't feel terribly motivated to read the next two tomes in the trilogy.

Earlier in the day I exercised, helped Mr hazelh with the Monday morning supermarket run, then prepared for the arrival of my two regular book group overnight guests. This time LauraMuir booked into the guest suite, and Winsford has the sofa bed in the study. When the guests arrived, we sat outside in the garden for tea and scones, then played a truncated game of Catan (which nobody won because we ran out of time).

Exercise today: 1 hour on the exercise bike; swim (60 lengths); walking (19,077 steps).