Welcome to Active Reading
Share the Pleasure - Join a Reading Group!You love reading, but perhaps you don’t have like-minded friends or family you can share the passion, tension, terror and joy of a great book with.
Maybe you have just finished a great read, but don’t what to go onto next. You have just found a new author you really like: does any other writer come close? Or were you really disappointed by a book that TV, magazines, and other readers have praised to the skies? The answer to all these problems can be found if you join a reading group!
At their simplest, Reading Groups are people who enjoy reading and talking about books. They are informal, welcoming and fun - not like going back to school. Some groups read a chosen book, author or subject each month, while others just choose from the latest titles and talk about the books they have enjoyed.
There is now a range of Reading Group Sets available for groups that like to read and discuss a chosen title. Reading group leaders can borrow these by asking at their local library.
Meetings may take place in the mornings, afternoons and evenings, and there are groups in most of Wigan’s libraries.
Joe Abercrombie: The Heroes
An unimpressive ring of stones stands on an ordinary small hill. There is a small town of no importance, a stream, some stands of trees. Some farmsteads. An inn. A couple of bridges. Over three days, this unmemorable place is the scene of a major battle. Not, as it turns out, an important or decisive battle, but a battle where several thousand lives on both sides are lost.
The combatants are The Union: a more or less “civilized” confederation of city-states, and The Northern Tribes: a more or less “savage” loose affiliation of warrior clans.
Neither side have firearms: this is war with bow, axe and sword, cavalry, pikemen and swordsmen. Perhaps the closest reference for this conflict in our history is “Braveheart”.
Joe Abercrombie tells the story of the battle through the individuals on both sides embroiled in it: from generals and clan chiefs to green recruits. The viewpoint shifts rapidly between the half-dozen characters through whose eyes we see the battle unfold.
The action is fast, hard and uncompromisingly bloody and the writing is often harrowingly graphic. The horrors of this war are not left to the imagination. Yet the novel is also very funny, with many moments of deep-black comedy and flashes of absurdity.
This is Joe Abercrombie’s fifth novel: the setting and several of the characters will be familiar to readers of his earlier work.
Don’t let the “Fantasy” tag put you off: this an invented setting, but is hard, fast, well-written military historical fiction that readers of Bernard Cornwell will be quite at home with.
Ordinary and less ordinary men, caught up in battle. Lots of arrogance and incompetence. Lots of self-serving ego. No Heroes.
Highly recommended.
Write With Us!
There is a free creative writing group running at Leigh Library on alternative Monday evenings from 5.30 to 6.45pm, or ring Leigh Library on 01942 404404 for more information.
Your Bard!
If you love Shakespeare, or haven’t read or seen his plays and want to know more, come along to Leigh Library’s new Shakespeare Reading Group, Your Bard. We meet in the Meeting Area in Leigh Library between 5.30 & 7.00pm on the fourth Thursday each month.
Everyone Welcome.
Reading Group Review
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ is a thought provoking book that tugs at the heart strings. Based on an event that actually happened during the long siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996, much of the novel is fictional as are the four main characters portrayed.
The novel brings to life the horrendous impact on the day-to-day lives of innocent civilians caught up in the conflict as they struggle to survive. The reader cannot help but be moved by Galloway‘s graphic description of the dangers faced in undertaking the simplest everyday tasks while under the constant threat of death from sniper fire.
The author uses simple language to describe the minutiae of life under siege, leaving the reader free to identify closely with the characters and the situations in which they find themselves. There is no sentiment here, just simple, understated language that evokes the emotions of the character’s thoughts and lives as they remember Sarajevo as it was and dream of rebuilding it again.
There is very little dialogue in the writing which, at times, takes on an almost dream-like quality as if the reader is being asked to look in on the shocking, dehumanising events through a haze, distant and remote. Even as the cellist, the focal point of hope, plays his haunting music in the square each day as a memorial to those who have gone, readers can imagine themselves taking on the role of the ghosts of those departed, silently drifting into the square as part of the audience to urge on those who are left to survive and to win.
The novel leaves many questions unanswered and there is no clear ending to the story which some book club readers found unsatisfactory but then, is that the nature of life during a siege? In any event, ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ is well worth the read.
Pat Mitchinson, Standish Reading Group 3