by Library Admin | 10 Aug 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
A captivating novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped. This stunning debut is “vast in scale and ambition, while luscious and inviting … in its intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review).
When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.
The September group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 18 September. Do join in.
by Library Admin | 26 Jun 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
From the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, powerful, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity.
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
The August group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday7 August. Do join in.
by Library Admin | 30 May 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
This month Cricklereaders will be enjoying Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Here’s an intriguing snippet from the start of the book:
For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines …
The June group will meet at the library at 1030 on Sunday 26 June. Do join in.
by Library Admin | 4 Apr 2022 | Cricklereaders, Cricklereaders Read
A highly topical read for the months of April/May. We’ll be reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. Why not read along with us and then join us in the library to discuss?
We’ll meet between 1030 and 1130 in the library on Sunday 15 May.
Spaces still available in our book group. See here for details on joining.
by Library Admin | 24 Feb 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
The April meeting will meet on Sunday 3 April at the library, from 1030-1130. The book for this month is The Forty Rules of Love, by Turkish author Elif Shafak.
Synopsis
“A novel within a novel, The Forty Rules of Love tells two parallel stories (The technique placing two story together is called juxtaposition in literature) that mirror each other across two very different cultures and seven intervening centuries.” It starts when a housewife, Ella, gets a book called Sweet Blasphemy for an appraisal.. This book is about a thirteenth century poet, Rumi, and his spiritual teacher, Shams. The book presents Shams’s Forty Love Rules at different intervals. The story presented in the novel is basically on “love and spirituality that explains what it means to follow your heart”.
The letter “b”
Every chapter of the book starts with letter “b”. It is because the secret of Quran lies in Surah Al-Fatiha and its spirit is contained in the phrase Bismillah ir Rehman ir Rahim (In the name of Allah, the most Beneficent and the most Merciful). The first Arabic letter of the Bismillah has a dot below it that symbolizes the Universe as per Sufism thoughts.
If you’d like to join in, drop us a line to info@cricklewoodlibrary.org.uk, or just read along with us and let us know what you think!
by Library Admin | 10 Jan 2022 | Cricklereaders Read
The February meeting will take place on Sunday at the library, from 1030-1130. The book for this month is American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummings.
Teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood.
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.
