Book Club on OwlBadger

Everything is Tuberculosis

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was my friend David Bradshaw’s choice for our August Trafalgar Street Book Club meeting. I was with David in the Lewes Waterstones when he chose it, and I bought my copy at the same time. It’s a little paperback of just 200 pages, an ideal Book Club choice. It’s probably the most recent book we’ve read so far, published last year. It took me until I’d started reading it to realise that I already knew of the author John Green. He’s the brother of Hank Green, of the YouTube channel, Vlog Brothers. I’m more a fan of Hank’s work, which I’ve enjoyed for years. Hank is very geeky, very science-oriented, but with a strong interest in social issues. Digging a little deeper into John Green’s work, I discovered that he’s actually better known as a best-selling novelist, with titles such as The Fault in Our Stars, but since they are mostly aimed at a teenage and young adult audience, they’d not crossed my radar.

Homage to Catalonia

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third Orwell book I’ve read in a row. They are all volumes from the Folio Society “Reportage” box set that includes Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia (this book), and two volumes of essays. I’ve also just bought D.J.Taylor’s biography of Orwell, The New Life, that I intend to read, so I’ll leave reflections on Orwell in general for my review of that book. Homage to Catalonia was published in 1938. It’s his sixth book, and third non-fiction work. It details his experiences fighting with the POUM militia for period of around six months between December 1936 and June 1937. The Spanish civil war was a defining struggle between fascism and various shades of socialism and communism that acted as an ideological prelude to the second world war. Franco’s fascists were supported by Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy, while the Spanish communists were funded and supplied by the Soviet Union. There were calls in both Britain and France for their governments to support the legitimate republican government of Spain against the fascists, but in the event both countries decided to stay neutral in the conflict, probably because opinion was divided about which side to back. In Chips Channon’s diaries he strongly supports Franco and the fascists; not an uncommon sentiment amongst the British establishment. This hugely angered left wing opinion in Europe and led to several tens of thousands to sign up to join the international brigades and various militia groups to fight on the republican side. Thanks to Orwell’s links with the British Independent Labour Party he was introduced to the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) a revolutionary Marxist group separate from the Soviet backed communists (the PSUC).

Pity The Reader

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was a Trafalgar Street Book Club choice by my friend David Bradshaw for our June meeting. I bought this paperback copy with its bright orange cover a month ago from Amazon. We now have an informal guideline not to choose a book over 300 pages, but that was after David had made this choice. It comfortably breaks that rule, coming in at around 400 pages. The cover announces that the authors are “Kurt Vonnegut”, in large letters, and “Suzanne McConnell” in smaller ones. This is an outright lie. The book has a single author, McConnell. She wrote it years after Vonnegut died, so he couldn’t possibly have had a part in it. To be fair, she extensively quotes Vonnegut, but that’s not the same as Vonnegut being the author. A better, and more honest, title would have been something like “Kurt Vonnegut’s teachings on writing by Suzanne McConnell”, but that’s not as effective for marketing and it means that it wouldn’t have sat next to Vonnegut’s books in the library or book shop.

Question 7

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have started a book club with two friends, Simon Peters and David Bradshaw. It came about during one of my long chats with David in Bread and Milk, a cafe on Trafalgar Street in Brighton’s North Laine. We often spend hours talking about life, the universe, and everything. One consistent theme has always been the books that we both have been reading. I can’t remember which one of us suggested it first, but we fell on the idea of starting a book club. I immediately thought of another friend, Simon Peters, with whom I’d had an ongoing, mutual, book recommending, email exchange for the last few months. David and Simon didn’t know each other, but I thought they would be sure to get on. We had an initial kick-off meeting where we tossed (digital) dice to decide who would choose the first book. I won, so of course I simply picked the next book from my interwar reading list, which was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I wrote the review that you find here before our first real meeting, so the book club didn’t feature; I would have read it anyway, so it didn’t feel relevant. We had an excellent and enjoyable evening at the White Hart in Lewes to discuss it. Simon’s choice was next. He first chose Giles Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, but when I said I’d read it, and despite my protestations that I’d happily read it again, he offered his second choice, this book, Richard Flanagan’s Question 7. I ordered this handsome hardback copy from Amazon the minute I got home.

A Moveable Feast

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

According to my Amazon order history I bought this little paperback edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast back in November 2017. I’ve no idea what prompted me to buy it. There’s no mention of it in my diary. It’s sat on the bookshelf in the living room next to The Old Man and The Sea, which I read with Yuna around May 2017, so maybe that inspired the purchase? It’s sat there for the last nine years waiting patiently, finally finding a slot in my interwar reading list, and at last making it to the top of the pile. Ernest Hemingway needs little introduction, he’s one of the giants of 20th C. American literature. He was involved in WWI as a volunteer ambulance driver in northern Italy and then returned to Europe and lived in Paris through much of the 1920s. It’s these Paris years, before the publication of his first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises, that are the subject of this book. Hemingway wrote it in the 1950s, thirty years after the events it described. The story goes that he was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris in the 1950s, when the Ritz’s owner, Charles Ritz, reminded him that he had a couple of old trunks in their storeroom. They dated back to the 1920s and contained his notebooks from that time. He had the notebooks transcribed and then edited them into this book. It’s partly a first hand record written at the time, and partly an old man remembering his youth. This is probably what gives the book its slightly schizophrenic character, between the immediate first hand reporting of a young writer, and other passages that are clearly the regrets of an old man. The book was published posthumously by his last wife, who was later of accused of tampering with the manuscript.