Ray and I attended our first book club meeting last night. This is going to be a very interesting and enlightening group to belong to. I always thought the books selected were the key to a good book club but I’m not sure now. The Friends of the Museum book club members are a collection of expats from all over the world – Brazil, Malaysia, UK, Australia, Turkey, India, US. It’s going to be fun to get to know them.
The book we read for this meeting was a non fiction book called Once a Jolly Hangman by Alan Sandrake and it’s about the justice system in Singapore and it’s use and misuse of capital punishment. The group leader promised us that not all the books will be this grim.
Our hosts for last night were Annelise and Gloverson Moro from Brazil. Annelise cooked us a beautiful Brazilian dinner (oops, didn’t realize dinner went along with the book club…gotta think of what to do on our hosting turn).
Here is the list of books for 2015 if anyone wants to read along with us. I have added links to Amazon.com as an added incentive to read along with us:
The Professor & the Housekeeper by Yoko Agawa
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The House of the Mosque by Qader Abdollah
Hard Choices – Challenging the Singapore Consensus by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh & Donald Low
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
Land Below the Wind by Agnes Newton Keith
Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto
The Man in the Box: a Story from Vietnam by Mary Lois Dunn & Jerri S. Richards
The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
With the diverse cultures and ethnicities in our group and in the book selection it will be eye opening for sure. We have the first three books on our Kindles already in preparation for our long flights to and from South America in a few weeks.
Yikes, our trip is in a few weeks! We’ve only been planning this trip for the past 8 months and it’s now just around the corner. Can’t wait and this will give us lots of new stuff to blog about.