Our current read: Animal Vegetable Miracle

Here is the link to Barbara KIngsolver's website for us to browse.... http://www.kingsolver.com/

The Siege: Our score

Better Late than ever! Over a month after our last gathering at Anja's, here are our scores! Many thanks to Anja for hosting such a lovely evening and for cooking the most delicious vegetable casserole :-))))! Have a lovely Christmas! The Siege: November 2012 Rampire Reader Characters Topic Style UPD* plot) Best Character Worst Character FINAL SCORE Anja 8.5 8 9 9 Marina Neighbour 34.5 Monica 9 8 9 9 Anna/Eugenia Father 35 Raka 9 9 10 9 Anna/Eugenia None 37 Sara 9 8 9 8 Anna Her boss 34 Sarah 9 9 10 7 Eugenia Elisabeth 35 I do not know why it comes out so MESSY! Apologies!

Our Autumn Read : The Siege by Helen Dunmore

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/05/book-club-siege-helen-dunmore The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011 Novels do not always attend to the evidence of the senses (how many smells or tastes do you find in Jane Austen or George Eliot?). It took James Joyce's Ulysses to bring fiction alive to ordinary odours and to make readers feel life at the fingers' ends. The realism of the senses is at the heart of Helen Dunmore's The Siege, which imagines the experience of enduring the siege of Leningrad during the second world war. The Siege is an agonising read, but also a numbing one. The novel, which narrates the first and worst winter of a siege that lasted from 1941 until 1944, animates the senses in order to feel them shutting down. Its early pages are full of intensely observed sensory details, filtered through the consciousness of its central character, 23-year-old Anna Levin. When she visits the dacha of her father's former lover, she notices the "warm, resinous and sleepy" air, "an acrid smell of fox" and, inside the house, its "dry, unopened smell". The character does not know what is coming, but the novelist does, and she prepares you for later privations with a page describing eating two fresh trout, with their "salty, delicate crust of scales". Tasting things is enough in itself. "Sharp, smoky taste of anchovies, potatoes rich and savoury with anchovy oil". Eventually, taste and smell will return, only cruelly. Leningrad's main food warehouse is bombed by the Germans and the acrid smell of burning sugar fills the air. Afterwards soot and food-grease coat the city's window ledges. "If you lift a hank of your own hair you can smell the stink of burnt fat". Numbness comes with the months of cold and hunger and takes possession of the narrative. It is a kind of insensate blankness in the minds of the novel's characters. After early waves of hopeful or terrified rumour, people become oblivious to any larger narrative of the war. Only three short chapters told from the point of view of Pavlov, in charge of the city's civil administration through the siege, give us any proper perspective on the unfolding of history. As winter takes its grip, "Slowly, the city sinks down, like a great ship sinking in an ice-field", and the characters themselves seem buried under the thickening snow, with all sense of time, beyond the difference between night and day, lost to them. They are limited to their bodies, to their senses, and these too begin to shut down. The novel's first paragraph, describing the glow of a long June evening before the German invasion, alights on vividly green lime leaves. "When you touch them, they are fresh and tender. It's like touching a baby's skin." You remember the simile later on, as characters notice the different hues that skin takes as hunger and cold grip a human body. The "blue-tinged face" of one woman desperately bartering for food proclaims her "a goner". In a food queue the woman ahead of Anna is clad in a heavy fox-fur hat and coat, the accoutrements of affluence; but when she turns, "her face is the colour of old candle-grease". "Everything makes you blink, and look twice." The novel is minutely attentive to flesh, Anna anxiously inspecting the still living body of her little brother – the thickening hairs on his arms and legs, the skin "yellowish, tight over prominent bones of his forehead and nose". You look with Anna and her lover Andrei at her sick father and notice a "thread of pulse" that unexpectedly "jumps in his wrist", but see too how his skin is "darkening, growing dusky around mouth and nose". The details, you trust, must be taken from the historical and documentary sources listed in a bibliography at the end of the novel. But the dismantling of a child's papier-mâché castle to extract the paste that they might eat is enacted with painful precision. Flesh is the final reality. Anna dreams of fat women at a steam bath, snorting with contentment, "their heads small above mountains of breast, belly, buttock and thigh". Hunger and cold bring a hallucinatory quality to perceptions, a sudden and impossible snatch of the scent of coffee from a ventilation shaft as the senses flicker. When taste is reactivated, it is a kind of ecstasy. They get hold of a jar of raspberry jam and the narrative switches into the second person to dramatise the reanimation of the senses. "The jam syrup slides over tongue, palate, throat. You feel suddenly warm . . . You feel your cheeks flushing." This sense is so primary that when, with the coming of summer, Anna and Andrei become lovers once more, we are told that "they tasted each other again". Taste is the final reality. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Helen Dunmore for a discussion on Wednesday 16 February at 7pm, Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1. Tickets are £9.50 online or £11.50 from the box office: 020 7520 1490. www.kingsplace.co.uk

Delizia! : Our Scores

Dearest RRs,

many thanks for another lively session and for your delicious contributions to our modern version of an Italian banquet :-)))!

Delizia!: Rampire Readers Scores 19/09/12

Rampire Reader	Theme	Unputdownableness	Style	Relevance	FINAL SCORE
Anja	7	9	6	5	27
Monica	10	5	7	9	31
Raka	6	4	3	5	18
Sara	7	3	6	5	21
Sarah	6	3	5	6	20

 

 

Like Water for Chocolate: Our Scores

It seems a long time ago now...But many thanks to Sara for hosting a lovely July evening!
Here are our scores!

	Characters	Topic	Style	UPD	Best Character	Worst Character
Raka	8	6	8	8	Nacha	Mama Elma
Sarah	7	6	5	5	Gurtrudis	Pedro
Monica	8	9	9	6	Tita	Mama Elma
Sara	7	8	8	7	Tita	Mama Elma
Anja	4	5	4	6	John	Pedro

Delizia! John Dickie - our summer read

Personally I think that nothing can sum up Italians' attitude to their food better than this clip in which our great actor Alberto Sordi plays the role of a wannabe American from Rome who ends up surrendering to the appeal of pasta after a strenuous battle against peanut butter and jam in the memorable 'Un Americano a Roma'....

Alberto Sordi - Macaroni io ve distruggo!

READ THIS!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/29/my-life-as-bibliophile-julian-barnes?CMP=twt_gu

Rampire Readers at Raka's! June 2012

LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE: SOOOO SPOOOKY!!!!

The Mistress of Spices : OUR SCORES!

Thank you, Raka, for a delicious meal that matched beautifully the theme of our read, toasted fennel seeds at the end included :-)!

Welcome Sarah to the RRs!

Here are the countable fruits of our discussion:

The Mistress of Spices:  May 2012

Rampire Reader	Characters	Topic	Style	UPD* (plot)	Best Character	Worst Character	FINAL SCORE
Anja	6	6	7	4	Old Mother	Raven	23
Monica	5	6	3	5	Geeta	Raven	19
Raka	7	7	9	5	Haneeda	Ahuja	28
Sara	6	7	8	6	Geeta	Tilo	27
Sarah	7	7	10	7	Geeta	Raven	31

The Mistress of Spices

http://www.chitradivakaruni.com/books/the_mistress_of_spices

FINAL SCORES ROUND 2 : Dalai Lama rules!!!!!

Apologies for the  'wonky' table!

Rampire Readers Round 3 : RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY

Characters/Usefulness40     Topic/Theme 40      Style/40      Plot/40     Global  Score/160     Average  Score                                                                             

The Secret Doctrine*    19               22                 10                         15                   66/90                    22

The Alchemist                25               28                   27                        29           109/160               27.25

The Art of Happiness     35              26                  25               31            17/160      29.25                             

The Good Man Jesus…  24              30                  29                   26               109/160            27.25

Herland                            21              30                        24             26       101/160                        25.25           

Siddhartha                       22             26                   24              25                     97/160                        24.25

*/30  and  /120   

Siddhartha : our scores

Dear RRs,

wonderful to catch up with you and discuss our last choice on the topic of religion and spirituality.

Opinions varied and a lively discussion led us to our scores:

Siddhartha:  May 2012

Rampire Reader	Characters	Topic	Style	UPD* (plot)	Best Character	Worst Character	FINAL SCORE
Anja	5	6	5	7	Kamal	Siddhartha	23
Monica	6	9	6	6	Ferryman	S’son	27
Raka	5	3	6	5	Kamala	Siddhartha	28
Sara	6	8	7	7	Govinda	S’son	28