Message from Ruth...
"Oh I am having trouble posting on the blog... must fix that... and need to acquire this month's book..."
I am hooked on the Flavia de Luce mysteries at the moment... 1950... small English village... 11yr old girl on a bike solving mysteries and getting into mischief... light easy reading to offset my arduous marking
Apart from that reading it is all chooks, chooks, chooks...
(:>=
:)))
Which Ever One to Read......
Mar 31, 2014
Mar 8, 2014
March Book - The Rosie Project
Next Meeting : Sunday 13th April 2014 at 7:30am, Union Street Cafe.
See you all there - Ps it is available from the library - so get on line and reserve. It is quite affordable from Amazon also as an e-book.
Enjoy!
Burial Rites - Our Breakfast Review
Burial Rites is an interesting factional read. We all enjoyed the book, and appreciated the author's exploration of the lives of the relevant people, and held a shared view that, Hannah Kent, did a great job intertwining the facts of this historical event to create this piece of faction.
Agnes Magnusdottir's will to survive was very palpable, and it raised the question of how strongly the human spirit strives to maintain it's connection to life, in spite of the sufferances that may be defining one's existence.
We agreed that the author provided a descriptive account of the impact of the landscape, class, power and the politics of gender, to assist the reader to both emphasise and related with the characters and their place in the narrative of the events which took place.
Having recently read, "Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood, it was hard not to compare the stories of these two women, whose fate was inevitably influenced by their status and servitude at a particular time and place in history. One has to wonder if those living in poverty and their capacity to have a fair hearing within the criminal justice system in today's really changed. Both the characters in Atwood's classic and Kent's novel could be judged as murderer's and in their time, were criticised for being calculating killers and women of loose morals. How revealing though that in looking at their lives and the relationships they were bound by, they were actually victims in so many ways. They made choices about how to survive the best they could. They were both bright women who took opportunities within their hard working lives and station within the class structure of their time, to improve themselves. Both knew the value of education. The immense power differentials across gender and class of their time, was always going to be a limiting factor to their sense of safety and security quality of their relationships.
We were all appreciative of how Kent powerfully and sensitively crafted the journey of the account of Agnes' journey toward her own execution.
We were left wondering about the indelible impact that Agnes would have left on Jon Jonsson's family and thought an Epilogue would have helped round this out for us…. I guess that is now to our own research.
Thank you Hannah Kent for being moved to write this story!
Agnes Magnusdottir's will to survive was very palpable, and it raised the question of how strongly the human spirit strives to maintain it's connection to life, in spite of the sufferances that may be defining one's existence.
We agreed that the author provided a descriptive account of the impact of the landscape, class, power and the politics of gender, to assist the reader to both emphasise and related with the characters and their place in the narrative of the events which took place.
Having recently read, "Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood, it was hard not to compare the stories of these two women, whose fate was inevitably influenced by their status and servitude at a particular time and place in history. One has to wonder if those living in poverty and their capacity to have a fair hearing within the criminal justice system in today's really changed. Both the characters in Atwood's classic and Kent's novel could be judged as murderer's and in their time, were criticised for being calculating killers and women of loose morals. How revealing though that in looking at their lives and the relationships they were bound by, they were actually victims in so many ways. They made choices about how to survive the best they could. They were both bright women who took opportunities within their hard working lives and station within the class structure of their time, to improve themselves. Both knew the value of education. The immense power differentials across gender and class of their time, was always going to be a limiting factor to their sense of safety and security quality of their relationships.
We were all appreciative of how Kent powerfully and sensitively crafted the journey of the account of Agnes' journey toward her own execution.
We were left wondering about the indelible impact that Agnes would have left on Jon Jonsson's family and thought an Epilogue would have helped round this out for us…. I guess that is now to our own research.
Thank you Hannah Kent for being moved to write this story!
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