A cracking January meeting

What fun we had at Maria's last night; Caroline, we missed you: it was a promisingly lively start to our new reading year.  Maria spoke persuasively about The King's Collection (I may have got the title wrong) which is about Charles I collection of art (costing £15,000 - a fortune at a time when he paid his art agents £15 a year) and how it was dispersed, somewhat ineptly, under the Commonwealth.

Catherine spoke about Keeping the World away by Margaret Foster which lead to an interesting discussion about her work.

We recalled reading Over (in December 2007) which we all felt was not her best book although some felt that it had a lingering effect despite this. We agreed, though, that it was certainly not a patch on The Diary of An Ordinary Woman which we had read previously as a group and had hugely enjoyed. I see that Margaret Foster's latest novel is to be released in March: Isa and May which, if the Amazon blurb is to be believed, would be a good book group book (a woman exploring her past through her two very different grandmothers, Isa and May).

Ann has started the new year with great gusto and has suggested an Annual General Meeting during the course of which we can work out not just what we read, but why.  Ann illustrated this by recalling that we read Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (in December 2009) because Phillip Larkin had described her as the Jane Austen of our time - although we disagreed with him.

I have undertaken to start pulling together a chronological list of our reading from my notes to which others can then contribute. We think that Sally D, who has notes of most books over the last few years, and Caroline will be good sources for this.  In the meantime, our group archivist (Maria, of course) dug out (with alarming ease) a notebook that looked like it dated from her school days in which she had notes of the book group's early reading back in 1999.  The founder members reminisced about the Africa theme which seemed, to those of us who weren't there, to have lasted a couple of years.  They will obviously have to compare notes and add to the master list.  Ann then has a plan ............