Coffee Morning

Third meeting this morning.  Well attended: Brendan, David, Don, Michael, Richard and Tony.

The theme for the meeting was listed as Strange Lands but somehow we managed to talk while hardly mentioning books or authors although Jim Crace, John Le Carré, Patricia Highsmith and John Steinbeck got honourable mentions.  The relative merits of story versus characterisation were debated. Cormac McCarthy got short shrift while poor old Jean-Paul Sartre was put firmly in his existentialist box and his homeland cast adrift in the Bay of Biscay, sauve qui peut.  Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehaviour was briefly described in relation to the formation of racial, economic or religious ghettos despite the absence of prejudice.

Serious discussion concerned the Welfare State but it is beyond my meagre skills to recap on the many useful ideas which would surely resolve the problems in double-quick time.

The theme for the May meeting is: You-Don’t-Have-To-But-You-Really-Should-Read ______. Needless to say, nobody will!

First Steps

The inaugural meeting of the Asynchronists convened today.  Present were David, Tony, Eugene, Richard and Don.  Michael sent his excuses: “shacked up in bed with a fever”, he claimed. The bar has been set high for future meetings.  Richard brought whiskey and Don made scones but David won universal acclaim for his “shampagne”.

The group is finding its feet and therefore much discussion concerned where each of us hopes the project will lead.  Books were central but there was clearly lots of appetite for other media (cinema, TV) and also excursions to cultural locations;  some of those mentioned included the Casino in Marino, Victor’s Way in Roundwood and Marsh’s Library (already visited by Tony and Don).  Future meetings (on the third Thursday of every month) will rotate through our homes or hopefully will involve outings to exotic locations.
In order to give a flavour of our respective tastes, everyone outlined the particular merits of a number of books they have enjoyed.  Hopefully a brief appreciation/critique of each will be added to this blog in the coming days.

Discussions were wide-ranging as they like to say after a typical Sinn Féin – DUP shindig.

Eugene liked:

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilbur 
• In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak

Tony liked:

• Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922 by Ronan Fanning
• The Lunar Men: The Inventors of the Modern World 1730-1810 by Jenny Uglow

David liked:

• The War That Never Was by Duff Hart-Davis
• Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler by Nicholas Rankin
• Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Gotz Aly

Richard liked:

• Wolf Hall and its sequels by Hilary Mantel
• In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Don liked:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard
• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins
• Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser
• Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped by A. Roger Ekirch

Michael phoned in to say he liked:

• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Other books mentioned favourably included:

• The African Queen by C. S. Forester
• The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura 
• Fatherland by Robert Harris
• If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino 
• The Island that Dared – Journeys in Cuba by Dervla Murphy
• An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd