Matilda's Book Club

Matilda's book club is a venture set up by the Royal Shakespeare Company to accompany the new musical version of Roald Dahl's Matilda. It's a virtual club, and features children's books recommended by the great and the good.

You can see it here; these are some of the choices:

David Schneider (& Cathy Cassidy) - Watership Down (which we're doing in January)
Quentin Blake - The Box of Delights
Paul Kaye - The Thirty Nine Steps
Charlie Higson - The Incredible Adventures of Professor Brainstawm
Emma Thompson - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Harriet Walter - The Silver Sword
Lisa Hammond-Marty - The Ice Dragon (A Noggin book)
Eowin Colfer - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Nick Clegg - The Gruffalo
David Cameron - Our Island Story

Links for the next meeting - The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Here are some links to help with the discussion:

Spark Notes' guide

A Review at About.com

The Wikipedia entry, which is has a good section on the themes

A 5 Star review on Amazon

A 1 Star review on Amazon

Plus - a 1 Star review of the 2009 film, in which the plot is changed so that Dorian Gray and Basil Hallwood have sex (& the ending is also different)

(In fact the plot is very different - see the Wikipedia entry for the film here)

We met at Kettner's which was one of Oscar Wilde's favourite places. In fact he was even arrested there.

Is Agatha Christie still relevant?

Thanks to Oli for spotting this article in The Guardian:

"There is little to distract the reader from the sense of information being parcelled out at careful intervals by an unseen but all-controlling hand. Nothing arises organically. In many ways, she reminds me of Enid Blyton. Her characters are ciphers, developed according to Occam's-razor principles – each one developed precisely as far as he or she needs to be for efficient propulsion of the plot, and no further. The dialogue is frequently risible – either purely expository, or banal musings on human psychology – and, for all that the early Christie books are venerated as beguiling period pieces, there is actually very little description in them, let alone any that makes the 20s, 30s and 40s glint in the mind's eye."

Discuss!

Links for the next meeting - Purge by Sofi Oksanen

British cover

American cover

A review in The Guardian

A review in Words Without Borders (Spoiler alert - there's one in the first line of the review...)

A play is opening in New York in 2011

& a film 'Puhdistas' (in Finnish) is scheduled to open in 2012

Sofi Oksanen's own site

We met at the Baltic Restaurant - a suitably Eastern European venue, with quite a lot of German and Eastern European food in the bar.

Frank Gehry's Treasure Island

Puffin have commissioned a number of special editions as part of their 70th Birthday celebrations.

You can buy this fabulous looking edition of Treasure Island by the architect Frank Gehry for £100.

Limited to 1000 copies only, and an earlier edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover now sells for over £300 on Amazon Marketplace.

Other books include James & The Giant Peach (Anthony Gormley) (already sold out) and Oliver Twist (Sir Peter Blake).

Links for the next meeting - The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

An interview with the author:



Interesting review from The Guardian

It has its own website, bless - and its own Facebook group

Book Club Guidance from the wacky old WWW

Packabook

Packabook is a new(ish) website that provides a list of novels set in different counties.

It's a great resource if you're trying to get inspired pre-holiday, and seems to have a pretty imaginative and varied list.

For example this is the selection for books set in Spain