The Sense of an Ending

We met on February 22nd at Mindy's house for an intimate gathering of just four book group members.  Mindy kept bringing out three plates, three forks, three napkins because she kept thinking, "only three tonight!"

We unanimously loved the book!  Previously, we had read Arthur and George in Book Club and some had read Flaubert's Parrot on their own.  We all agreed that The Sense of an Ending far surpassed Barne's other works.  We spent some time talking about the young adolescent boys in the novel, discussing how history was written in with their high school history teacher and then how the main character, Tony writes his own personal history.  New facts are brought to light which cause some dissonance and cause him to revisit his past.  We could all personally relate and shared some liberties we had taken with our own histories and what it felt like when we confronted some facts and feelings we had not considered until they were right in front of us!

We missed Ed, Fred, Chrysanne and Katie!  We are reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for next time and we had to change the date to March 19th in order to accommodate Terry's trip.  We had a little discussion about Book Club structure given the fact that Don is no longer here to enlighten us on secondary sources and multiple levels of meaning.  We thought we might try having a person assigned to lead the discussion.  Mindy is on for next time.  See you at Fred's with a back up at Tim's!