Orlando by Virginia Woolf

 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Orlando flits between incarnations of either sex over 600 years of different lives. Orlando, a young man living in the Elizabethan age who is about to be transformed. The story also ends with Orlando, a woman writer living in the 20th century. The entire novel is a fictionalised history of Vita Sackville-West, of an imagined past life she lived under the guise of Orlando several centuries before she met Woolf. The prose is beautiful but the story disjointed. The exploration of self, identity within the framework of history is interesting. 

 “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.”

Marks out of 10:  between 5 - 9

Words used to describe it:  fabulous, lonely, romp, raphsody, ahead of its time, bonkers, roller coaster/Alice in Wonderland feel

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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonny Garmus

Next Meeting

Monday 11th September at 126 Harbord St

How the World Really Work: A Scientists Guide to our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil

A departure for this book club, a factual book which was extremely dense with information. Most of us have taken more than the month to read it, finding it easier to read in small digestible chunks rather than all in one go. Vaclav Smil, has written a book distilling so much information your head reels.  The book opens 'with the centrality of (fossil-based) energy to modern civilisation, turning to the production of food, plastics, steel, ammonia and cement as the drivers of globalisation and to a broad landscape of risks (viruses, diets, global warming and the ‘singularity’ of artificial intelligence).'  He outlines how intertwined our current lifestyle and economy are with fossil fuels and the difficulty we will have uncoupling ourselves. There are criticisms that some reviewers have made that Mr Smil does not give the new net zero push enough credence.  But if you would like to read an interesting book dense with information about the push towards a fossil fuel future this should be added to your book stand. 

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Orlando by Virginia Woolf