Bar book club--report
It's been a little over a month since our last meeting at the bar--we were supposed to hold it last week, but very few of us could make it. I'd known for a while that I wouldn't be there, so I hadn't read the book...but with the reschedule, I suddenly could, and had to read a long and dense book on the history of Scotland (and Scottish people abroad) from about late 1600s to late 1800s. I read nonfiction differently than I read fiction, though, especially nonfiction like this (a nonfiction Annie Dillard essay I might read more like I'd read fiction), so it wasn't too difficult to get it finished on time. (I rediscovered how to get a sense of what's going on just by reading the first sentence in each paragraph in some sections...)
We had a good discussion, sometimes about the book itself and often about other things that something in the book made us think about. One member of our group is actually from Scotland (he was the one who'd brought the book as a possibility), so that made from some interesting discussion about Scotland in general. And I now know (through him, not the book) that people from Glasgow are called Glaswegians and their accent is the Glaswegian accent. The Edinburgh accent, on the other hand, he described as a faux-posh accent. He grew up, it should be noted, exactly halfway between the two cities, but he said the Glaswegian accent extends to just a few miles from Edinburgh, and most of the people between there seem to identify more with Glasgow than Edinburgh (at least by his account).
There was no single drink of choice, but I went for the Cask-Conditioned Punjabi Pale Ale. I usually like the darker beers better, but that's one I'll have fairly often too.
Next month...all of the options looked good, including The River Why, which I've read and loved, but our final decision was an account of illegal immigration in the 1980s called Coyotes. Here's hoping it inspires us all to defend immigration from the extremist (/racist) voices that dominate so much of the discussion...
It's been a little over a month since our last meeting at the bar--we were supposed to hold it last week, but very few of us could make it. I'd known for a while that I wouldn't be there, so I hadn't read the book...but with the reschedule, I suddenly could, and had to read a long and dense book on the history of Scotland (and Scottish people abroad) from about late 1600s to late 1800s. I read nonfiction differently than I read fiction, though, especially nonfiction like this (a nonfiction Annie Dillard essay I might read more like I'd read fiction), so it wasn't too difficult to get it finished on time. (I rediscovered how to get a sense of what's going on just by reading the first sentence in each paragraph in some sections...)
We had a good discussion, sometimes about the book itself and often about other things that something in the book made us think about. One member of our group is actually from Scotland (he was the one who'd brought the book as a possibility), so that made from some interesting discussion about Scotland in general. And I now know (through him, not the book) that people from Glasgow are called Glaswegians and their accent is the Glaswegian accent. The Edinburgh accent, on the other hand, he described as a faux-posh accent. He grew up, it should be noted, exactly halfway between the two cities, but he said the Glaswegian accent extends to just a few miles from Edinburgh, and most of the people between there seem to identify more with Glasgow than Edinburgh (at least by his account).
There was no single drink of choice, but I went for the Cask-Conditioned Punjabi Pale Ale. I usually like the darker beers better, but that's one I'll have fairly often too.
Next month...all of the options looked good, including The River Why, which I've read and loved, but our final decision was an account of illegal immigration in the 1980s called Coyotes. Here's hoping it inspires us all to defend immigration from the extremist (/racist) voices that dominate so much of the discussion...
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