The end of the year is nigh.
There’s a bafflingly odd M&S advert on Tv, which suggests Twiggy and Jason Orange live together, getting into Middlesbrough in a car is a mare, and the houses near me are draped in neon.
Before everyone gest sucked up in a dizzying list of parties and present swapping meet ups, we bring you the last Middlesbrough Book Group meeting of the year. Early. Nice aren’t we?
The next meeting will be Tuesday, November 25th, at 6.30pm as usual,and upstairs in the ref section of Central library.
The book being discussed is The Giro Playboy by Michael Smith which I’m really looking forward to talking about!
The first meeting in 2009 will be on Tuesday 27th January and we’ll be reading Julia Darling’s The Taxi Driver’s Daughter……
…….but before we go for the year, it would be ace to get some tips for tp books you’ve read this year, so leave a comment if you like and let us know what we should look out for in the January sales.
Make everyone read Isaac Deutcher’s 3-volume biography of Trotsky. Go on. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease
‘Amy and Jordan’ by Mark Beyer. Probably won’t be in the January sales but there’s some of Beyer’s co-dependent dysfunctional couple of cursed jerks in a book called ‘Graphic Fiction’. That’s a big hardback book packed full of awesome artistic and underground comics.
I’ve read two books by Beyer. ‘Agony’ is one long, dreamlike series of truly unfortunate events (at least none of Lemony Snickett’s protagonists get fired, decapitated, and eaten by a fish within the first 5 pages). ‘Amy and Jordan’ is da bomb though, a compendium of exquisitely weird stand alone comic strips that explore character and form within their tiny spaces. There are some genuinely desperate elements but the main effect is charming and astonishing gloom-fun.