Christmas Gifts

Minutes: Meeting on 20th February 2020

Looks like Le Journal in Monkstown has deservedly become our preferred venue. On this occasion we decided to discuss books received as Christmas gifts. Eugene, Michael and Tony all presented terribly lame excuses as to why they couldn’t make it, but we all clearly understood that they simply hadn’t received books as gifts (or perhaps anything else).

Richard presented Shadowlands by Joseph O’Connor, ingeniously stickered to ensure it returns to its owner. Brendan was happy to borrow it and evaluate the efficacy of Richard’s system.

Brendan, claiming that his friends and family are forbidden to buy him books, presented two books he purchased himself: a Donald Trump biography (title conveniently forgotten) and E.M. Forster‘s A Passage to India. Eventually he conceded that his daughter offered him the first Harry Potter book which he enjoyed.

David, an inveterate non-fiction reader surprised us with Swordland by Ruadh Butler, historical fiction set around the arrival of the Norman’s in Wexford in the 11th century.

Don presented The Lamisters by Declan Burke, an hysterical post-modern parodic romp and Paul Theroux‘s classic travel book: The Old Patagonian Express.

Following these discussions, we concluded by airing and resolving some of the more pressing political and economic problems facing humanity but these are excluded from these minutes since nobody ever listens to us anyhow.

Utopian Morning

We had our monthly meeting in the Alliance Française on Kildare Street. Imagine, it’s been thirty years since I passed through its doors!

The theme for the meeting was dystopia but it was clear to me the our membership are living utopian retirements. Indeed, Eugene’s world was so utopian that he came to find out if people actually wrote about dystopia.

Michael offered us Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and we marvelled at the kind of idealogical madness that causes people to condemn themselves for the cause. Richard gave us Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven about a global pandemic which he described as “unputdownable” and Eugene was quick to snap it up. I note it’s being developed into a TV series.  (I should have thought to recommend he play Pandemic, a cooperative boardgame.)

Tony produced two classics, (Kafka’s The Trial and Huxley’s Brave New World) but preferred to talk about the decline of democracy in the world we actually live in. David gave us Tom Wall’s Dachau to the Dolomites, on how the Nazi’s treated special prisoners as bargaining chips as they saw the end approaching. Don produced Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes about the horrors of colonialism in 19th century Africa and how it was reflected in literature. Richard decided to try it out.

After some derogatory remarks by Don, it was suggested that the theme for the next meeting (postponed to May) will be, Best Book by a Woman Author. Richard assures me this is not an oxymoron 🧐.

 

 

Summer Roundup

Our little group assembled again this morning for the “indoor” season.  Full attendance!! We must have nothing else to do with our time. 😉

This was our first ‘dry’ meeting with Eugene providing coffee and pastries instead of alcohol.  Very Nice!

This summer, Michael read books he stumbled on at random with less than auspicious results although Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth pleased.  Don dipped into books from 20+ years ago, finding the novels generally enjoyable (especially Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Djinn), but the non-fiction a bit dated. David took a break from reading, managing about 20 pages. Tony discovered Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s series. Richard enjoyed the feel of the wind in his hair (through Nick Hunt’s: Where the Wild Winds Are).  Brendan read about a journalist’s experience in Iraq (title?). Time constraints meant that Eugene didn’t have anything like the time its author had to tell us about Mein Kampf.

Naturally, Brexit had its usual coverage.

Theme for November meeting will be:

Lonely Books: books that somehow made it to our bookshelves to find nothing else quite like them for company; that is, subjects we don’t usually venture into.

A Christmas/New Year lunch will be arranged in January.

Expedition!

At Tony’s suggestion, I looked into a September Asynchronists Expedition.

I can suggest the following programme:

Tues (September 11) : Ryanair to Nantes (currently priced at €35).  Pick up at airport at 4pm, destination Moulin de la Ville Norme.

Wednesday : day trip to the Mont St. Michel (above left), lunching in and visiting St. Malo.

Thursday : short hike between the Phare de Cap Fréhel (top right) and the Fort de la Latte (bottom right). Outdoor meeting of the Asynchronists accompanied by galettes (savoury pancakes) and Breton cider.  Dinner au moulin.

Friday : Breton bowls and various entertainments at the mill.

Saturday (September 15) : visit to elephant of Nantes (giant automaton) en route to airport (4:30 pm, currently priced at €52).

Alternatively, Ryanair also fly Thursday (13th), permitting a more compressed programme, with only one full day.

I expect this is only a reasonable project if we can attract a quorum.  Partners are welcome to join us.  Please let me know by WhatsApp what you think.

Into Mothballs

Our May meeting convened this morning; our fourth, still enjoyable and well attended. We celebrated our continued existence with the launch (!?) of our bookmarks. (One can’t help wondering if champagne flutes would not have been more appropriate 🙂  ).

The format today was for each of us to ‘sell’ one book to the group.  Consistent with our headstrongedness (!!!) most insisted on selling at least two.  Subjects ranged from history to psychology, economics to travel and beyond. The choices seem to have struck a number of chords as the meeting concluded with a number of library transactions.

Brendan offered war and history:

• Afghan Guerilla Warfare: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet Afghan War by Ali Jalali and Lester Grau
• The Man Who Invented Hitler by David Lewis

Michael went for weight with about 2000 pages of history 🙂 :

• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
• The Decisive Battles of the Western World (Volume 1) by J.F.C. Fuller

Don restrained his mathematical gene and tried psychology and behaviour with:

• Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater
• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

Tony reminded us “we are all Keynesians now” by opting for:

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
• On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes by Axel Leijonhufvud
• The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath by Ben Bernanke

Richard, just returned from Morocco, regaled us with the pleasure of dipping into familiar poetry around a campfire  (no specific title recommended) and counselled us to trust our parents by choosing a hand-me-down classic such as:

• The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

Eugene offered optimistic (imho realistic) statistics and did a bit of member psych-analysis, concluding that we are a bunch of people with a deep “distrust of woo” who were in need of a title with God in it so he suggested:

• The Mind of God by Paul Davies
• Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Richard suggested a theme for a future meeting:

Books we’re tempted to read but really shouldn’t

… because deep down there’s something awful about them.

Brendan also introduced us to Document Number Nine, by the Chinese Communist Party, also known as a Briefing on the Current Situation in the Ideological Realm.

Summer is upon us and the club is being put in mothballs for a few months. Our next meeting is pencilled in for the third Thursday of September (20th). Get it in your diary.

Have a great summer. Stay in touch on WhatsApp.

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!

Highly Regarded Books

Our second meeting convened today with four members present.  Eugene provided bubbly and Richard offered coffee and biscuits.  The theme was:

highly regarded books we’ve tried and our good/bad experience with them

We were introduced to Richard’s 100-page Test™ which is a foolproof copyrighted and patented method for deciding if a book should be ‘highly regarded’.

Books presented and discussed at the meeting included:

Eugene presented:

• A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins 
• De Bono’s Thinking Course by Edward de Bono

Richard presented:

• From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East by William Dalrymple
• Nine Lives: In search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple
• Quarantine by Jim Crace

Don presented:

• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Herzog by Saul Bellow
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

Michael presented:

• The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order by David Selbourne
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Other books mentioned as good reads included:

• Adventure Fiction:  The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes
• Classic Fiction: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• World History:  The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History by McNeill & McNeill
• History/Seafaring:  Below the Convergence: Voyages Toward Antartica 1699-1839 by Alan Gurney
• History/Seafaring:  In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

The general feeling is that this should remain a forum for a nice morning chat about books with no need to ‘keep-up’ since the volume of material discussed is already overwhelming.  The next meeting is scheduled for April 19th.

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