I'm not posting today as I'm not finished reading Ruth Ware's latest thriller, One Perfect Couple, about five couples who are chosen to be contestants on a new Reality TV show on a desert island, where all is not what it seems and unfortunately, not everyone will leave the island alive.
More info next week...
Bye for now...
Julie
It’s late afternoon/early evening on this first Sunday of October, and it was a beautiful, warm-ish sunny day that is turning into a twilight filled with golden sunlight and the rippling shadows of the leaves in the breeze. We’ve been so fortunate with our weather here in Waterloo Region so far, particularly if you consider other areas in Canada, the US and around the world. But I feel like this weekend most likely marks the end of the real “summer-like” weather we’ve had, what I consider “shorts and t-shirts” weather. That’s fine, as I’ve been ready for fall for a few weeks now and can’t wait for the cooler days and chilly evenings.
My Volunteer book club met yesterday to discuss Robertson Davies’ classic, Fifth Business, the first book in “The Deptford Trilogy”, and it was a huge success! We’ve actually read it in this book club before, in June 2014, but since most of my members joined post-2014, it was new for nearly everyone, at least as a book club selection. Several people have read it before on their own, and one member was with me in 2014, but it was still an excellent book to discuss. This book begins on a snowy evening in 1908 in the small fictional town of Deptford, when our narrator, nearly-twelve-year old Dunstable Ramsay, is engaging in a snowball fight with his friend/enemy Percy Boyd Staunton. While he is racing home for dinner, in order to dodge the last snowball thrown by Percy, Dunstable darts in front of the figure of the heavily pregnant wife of the Baptist parson, Mary Dempster, who is hit, falls to the ground and is helped home by her husband, only to later go into premature labour and give birth the their son Paul, who is in need of special care round-the-clock to keep him alive. Mrs Ramsay, a firm Scots woman, steps in and takes charge of the little one and helps Mary recover as well, although she never really does recover fully and is considered “simple” by the ladies in the town from this point forward. Dunstable feels tremendous guilt for this, because, although he didn’t actually throw the snowball, if he hadn’t stepped in front of Mrs Dempster, she would never have been hit. He thus takes it upon himself to care for her throughout his life inasmuch as he is able, while Percy and Paul remove themselves from Deptford altogether. All three, Dunstable, Paul and Percy, are “twice born” (you’ll have to read the book to find out what that means), and their lives crisscross and intersect at sometimes interesting, sometimes highly unusual moments, until the final satisfying conclusion to this wondrous, psychological, mythical, spiritual, saintly, literary mystery… except that there’s more to explore in the other two books in the trilogy, The Manticore and World of Wonders. Everyone loved it. They loved the language and the characters, and they loved following these characters in their individual development as well and their ever-changing relationships with one another throughout the story. Even the secondary characters, such as Leola and Ignacios Blazon and Diana, were fascinating, and we could have discussed for a whole afternoon and still not finished with everything there is to be said and discussed about this book. We loved the deviousness and manipulative nature of the characters, and talked about the ways in which they recreated their histories to suit their purposes. One member who listened to this as an audiobook said that at first she thought, "oh no, it's such a slow story", but ended up deciding that, while it was in fact a slow story, it was a good story. Several members said they wanted to read the other books in the trilogy, and I recommended that they do so. In fact, I would highly recommend any of the books in “The Salterton Trilogy”, “The Deptford Trilogy” and maybe even “The Cornish Trilogy”, although my recollection of that one is not as strong as the other two. If you have never read anything by this Canadian literary icon, you should run, not walk, to your nearest library to check out a copy of Fifth Business today!
That’s all for now. Take care and read on!
Bye for now... Julie
