MERRY XMAS FROM CAFFEINE AND CHAPTERS SOCIAL BOOK CLUB!!!

High Tea Xmas Break Up


HAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Sorry I couldn't be there,
but there's always next year!!

Maxine

Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York ~ Anjelica Huston

"Living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse, Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which, between movies, her father brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter OToole and Marlon Brando. Every morning, Anjelica and her brother visited their father while he took his breakfast in bed.

In London, where she lives with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separate, Huston encounters the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudies Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she is devastated when her mother dies in a car crash.

At just 18  she moves to New York, falls in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer Bob Richardson, and becomes a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigates a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies.

A Story Lately Told ends as Huston launches her Hollywood life. The second part of her storyWatch Me opens in Los Angeles in 1973 and will be published in Fall 2014. Beguiling and beautifully written, Hustons memoir is a an eye opener, covering EVERY aspect of her young life."

Read by Robyn S.

The Light Years: Cazalet 1 (Cazalet Chronicles) ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

"For two unforgettable summers they gathered together, safe from the advancing storm clouds of war. In the heart of the Sussex countryside these were still sunlit days of childish games, lavish family meals and picnics on the beach."

This is the first of series of 5 set during the Second World War.  It was interesting but I don't think I could struggle through the entire 5 books.

Read by Robyn S.

Love All ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

"A  slow moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home, Florence Plover, a garden designer in her sixties whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas's wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously."

This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - Slow, rambling and full of extraneous characters, this book only held my attention because of the homely setting and the promise that surely something would change in the lives of the people involved. I found the action unsatisfactory because the arts festival at the centre of the story wasn't covered at all, and because the challenges posed for the various key characters weren't really fully explored. Like other reviewers, I found Thomas annoying and Mary the martyr irritating, even if their responses to their life situations were realistic for the late sixties. Disappointingly, the most interesting and central character, Percy, simply faded away at the end of the novel, never to be seen again, The whole story was a bit disjointed cutting between all the characters nothing was ever really resolved by any of the characters.

Read by Robyn S.

Cat's Cradle ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr

I came across this title in my search for a book in the Science Fiction genre – a genre pretty much unknown to me so I had no reference point of familiarity.

Having read it, I’m not sure whether the purists regard this as fair dinkum sci-fi; I think it would fit into the genre of political satire, maybe even religious satire. It appears to revolve around the thesis that ‘pure’ scientists developed products for the purpose of solving a particular problem, without regard for the dangers of unintended consequences.  Hence, the narrator, John (Jonah) goes in search of ‘the average American’ account of what people were doing on the day Hiroshima was devastated. His particular targets are the offspring of Felix Hoenikker, the character drawn from the physicist who played a part in developing the Atom Bomb to enable the war-weary USA to end the war against Japan.

Initially, Jonah interviews Hoenikker’s scientific supervisor ‘only on paper’ who describes Hoenikker’s obsession with a military officer’s ironic statement that the most valuable invention for the military would be a way to ‘keep them out of the mud’; apparently most soldiers considered the constant slogging through mud with heavy loads their biggest complaint about army life. Hoenniker’s response was to develop a substance called ‘ ice-nine’ which, while remaining solid at room temperature, would immediately turn liquid water into solid form: just one crystal of ice-nine would solidify a swamp or river. This substance remained in the inventor’s possession, ultimately to be in the possession of his three dysfunctional offspring.

Their characters appear to draw on stereotypical society misfits of the time: Frank, the antisocial kid who tortured insects, hated school and spent his early life building and designing miniature buildings and planning miniature towns with an exquisite talent. This talent combined with his antipathy to regulation, led him to a job as Chief Architect on the remote island of San Lorenzo. Sister Angela, described as 6-feet-tall and horse-faced (double-whammy misfit qualifications for a girl!), has had to stay at home to care for her father after the death of her mother, and had no prospects of personal happiness until the day of her father’s funeral, when a former acquaintance knocked on the door, and she married him 3 weeks later! Baby brother Newton, a dwarf, suffered all the negative social implications of that condition, and thought he had found happiness in an affair with a Russian dwarf dancer who, having taken asylum in USA, promptly applied to go back to Russia rather than live with the media frenzy created by the affair: he was heartbroken and targeted by the tabloid media because of the novel situation, but years later, as a well-adjusted human being, takes pleasure in the fact that he ‘…may not have a marriage, but at least I had a honeymoon’.

The mythical Caribbean island of San Lorenzo becomes the gathering place for all the main characters of the book, as the narrator, Jonah, is sent there on another story, and is hoping to find the beautiful woman with whose picture he has fallen in love. In the meantime, he has discovered a cult-like religion called Bokononism; named for its founder, an African-American whose name, Johnson, translates as Bokonon in the dialect native to San Lorenzo. He had arrived there after being shipwrecked on one of his lifelong adventures in search of higher learning. The miracle of this survival gave him an epiphany:

  “A fish pitched up

By the angry sea,

I gasped on land

And I became me.”

He felt reborn, and determined to surrender to whatever fate brought him after emerging naked from salt water. Features of this fatalistic belief system fascinate Jonah, and events in the book seem made to fit his conversion to its beliefs.

Thus, for various reasons, Jonah, the 3 Hoenikker children, and two other couples (the Mintons, stereotypical Darby and Joan; and the Crosbys, quintessential insensitive Ugly Americans) meet on a flight to San Lorenzo. During the flight, character elements are drawn out of each of the people and analysed by Jonah as the narrator: this section of the book, with all its irony about Christian beliefs, the American way of life, and the cruel condescension shown to minorities, was the highlight for me.

On San Lorenzo, it becomes obvious that the dictatorial ruler is terminally ill, and further, that he has in his possession a quantity of ‘ice-9’ – the use he makes of it, and the consequences for the island and its inhabitants, including the passengers on the recently-arrived flight, are indeed the stuff of science fiction. By the end I found it a bit tiresome, but there is no doubting the power of Vonnegut’s satirical prose, particularly in the context of that era, when America and the whole world began seriously to wonder and worry about where untamed scientific advance might lead us. The ‘cat’s cradle’ of the title is explained in a typically unexpected sequence, but I won’t disclose it!

Helen