Hayley

Great! I think I’ll be going for The Devil and the Dark Water too then (as soon as I’ve finished off Nicholas Nickleby!) I might also re-read Rime of the Ancient Mariner because it’s been years since I read that! 😄

Great! I think I’ll try The Devil and the Dark Water (as soon as I’ve finished off Nicholas Nickleby). It’s been a very long time since I read that, so I might join you!

Happy first of the month! With one additional vote in for the sea, are we all happy to proceed with that without a poll? (although @lunababymoonchild, I like the idea of including poems in our reading, based on different themes! There are definitely plenty featuring the sea…)

Don’t forget to throw any other suggestions in before tomorrow! 😄

Do we have Circe yet? She has to score pretty highly for all the seducing and turning men into animals. The head witch from Roald Dahl’s The Witches was also very villainous.

My suggestion (as it reminds me of summer): A book related to the sea. We might read classics featuring sea voyages (like Moby Dick or Treasure Island) or something with a bit of a fantasy twist like The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Taunton (I really want to read that one…). There are also loads of non-fiction books that would fit with this one, like maybe Michael Palin’s Erebus.

I can’t believe it’s nearly time for our third group already! As a reminder for those who haven’t participated before: ‘Throughout 2023, the BCF Book Club will be in session! We will vote on categories four times per year (January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December) and participants will choose a book from that category. This means that we might not all be reading the same book, but we will all be reading from the same category.’ So please leave your category suggestions for the third Book Club event (July-September) below! We will hold a poll on Friday 30th, if necessary, to make our final decision. It would be helpful if you could leave a book suggestion next to your suggested category .

It’s time to start thinking about the next challenge and I’m making good progress with Nicholas Nickleby, but I still don’t think I’ll quite finish it all before the end of the week! I’ve reached a point in the book now where

I definitely have that feeling with a couple of text books too. They don’t even contain up-to-date information any more but there are a lot of memories connected to them as objects!

@muggle not that looks delicious! I could eat a big slice of that right now, with cream 😄. I also love raw rhubarb!

Hi and welcome! I know that we have a bit of a different layout to BGO, so just let us know if anything seems confusing!

I do really want to read this one! I won’t have time to do it for this challenge though, I’m on chapter 27 of Nicholas Nickleby and that’s not quite half way through yet! I am really enjoying it though. There’s quite a range of characters in this one and I’ve reached a point where some of their stories are starting to intertwine, which is a feature I always enjoy in Dickens’ books!

That sounds really good! I’ve started to really like eggplant recently (although we call it aubergine here). I used to find the texture a little unpleasant but then my boyfriend pointed out that I’d probably just had badly cooked aubergine… so he made some and I love it! I am a very big pasta fan too 😄

Salt Publishing are having a very good summer sale on some of their books right now. I wasn’t planning to buy books for a while but I just got three I’ve had my eye on: Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant, Liminal by Bee Lewis and New World Fairy Tales by Cassandra Parkin. They were £2, £2.99 and £1, respectively, for the paperbacks! https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/summer-specials

Well you know one person now 😄. I loved Alice in Wonderland! I was probably heavily influenced by the Disney movie but my dad bought a hardback set of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for me when I was about seven and they were my prized possession. They felt very grown up. I did actually find them hard to read at that age but I think, because they were challenging, I felt as though I was unlocking new things from it all the time. And I think that’s part of the appeal of them as an adult too. Carroll wrote in so many clever puzzles and references to things he was interested in, it still feels like there are new things to discover! My sister did think it was ‘too weird’ as well though. Maybe I was just a weird child 😂.

We had quite a long thunderstorm yesterday evening and there are more forecast for this afternoon. It only cooled down very slightly though, so I’m still very hot 🥲.

Thunderplump is a brilliant word 😄 My weather app is telling me it will be 28C today (!) and might thunder. Not ideal on one of my busiest work days 🥲

Winter’s Gifts is out! I’m going to have to resist buying my copy for a little while (after the unexpectedly huge expense of having to buy a new laptop when mine died during the week and an upcoming trip we planned ages ago!) but I’m hoping some of you will be able to tell me if it’s a good one 😄

Ah, one of the reviews I read suggested that it was about finding love and I took that to mean it would follow one or both of them finding romantic relationships!

This one is already on my list - I can’t wait to get it! I’ve seen some rave reviews about how beautifully this is written but discovering that it centred on a love story did put me off. I don’t generally enjoy books that have romance as their central plot. Still not sure whether I want to try this one or not!

Yes to all of the above!! Also: tuna and sweetcorn or baked beans 😄

Apparently this came out in May but I only just saw it. I'm quite surprised by some of the results! Personally, I wouldn't have put Where the Wild Things Are above Alice's Adventures in Wonderland... I'm also surprised that The Cat in the Hat, Paddington and The Wind in the Willows are all down in the 60's. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book made it into the list! What do others think?

Very nice! I love baked potatoes. They are sadly underrated. For those in the UK, Morrisons have a new deal on - 20% off all fish on Friday's if you have one of their 'more' cards. We had rainbow trout yesterday and it was lovely.

I also absolutely love this book 😄. I think, like we were saying before about Terry Pratchett, the synopsis or blurb can’t do justice to the actual book. The plot sounds simple but that adventure-fantasy theme is just used to very beautifully explore the complex emotions of childhood and those we carry into adulthood. Fully agree that Gaiman has a knack of speaking to your inner-child too. Although I haven’t read Coraline and I need to! This is one of those books that I feel I should have read, but have just never gotten around to. I do like the opening line!

That is true, thanks Luna 😄. I set the new bookshelf up yesterday but realised that some of the little brackets for the shelves are missing, so I can’t put two of them on yet! I still managed to fill a couple of shelves with books I had just stacked in piles, so I’m very pleased with that. I will take pictures when I finally get it finished.