Bookgroup: Bad Behaviour - A Memoir of Bullying and Boarding School

Summary: Fourteen-year-old Rebecca Starford spent a year at this school in the bush. In her boarding house sixteen girls were left largely unsupervised, a combination of the worst behaved students and some of the most socially vulnerable. As everyone tried to fit in and cope with their feelings of isolation and homesickness, Rebecca found herself joining ranks with the powerful girls, becoming both a participant--and later a victim-- of various forms of bullying and aggression. Bad Behaviour tells the story of that year, a time of friendship and joy, but also of shame and fear. It explores how those crucial experiences affected Rebecca as an adult and shaped her future relationships, and asks courageous questions about the nature of female friendship. What I Thought: Really fascinating read as basically the author is the same age as me. Gosh women can be nasty.

Bookgroup: Wimmera

Summary: In the long, hot summer of 1989, Ben and Fab are best friends. Growing up in a small country town, they spend their days playing cricket, yabbying in local dams, wanting a pair of Nike Air Maxes and not talking about how Fab's dad hits him, or how the sudden death of Ben's next-door neighbour unsettled him. Almost teenagers, they already know some things are better left unsaid.
Then a newcomer arrived in the Wimmera. Fab reckoned he was a secret agent and he and Ben staked him out. Up close, the man's shoulders were wide and the veins in his arms stuck out, blue and green. His hands were enormous, red and knotty. He looked strong. Maybe even stronger than Fab's dad. Neither realised the shadow this man would cast over both their lives. Twenty years later, Fab is still stuck in town, going nowhere but hoping for somewhere better. Then a body is found in the river, and Fab can't ignore the past any more.




What I Thought: Wow. Tough content (had to pause to gain my sanity). Brilliant read.

Bookgroup: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Summary: Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living.


What I Thought: Absolutely brilliant - listened to the audiobook version and it was just wonderful. Really enjoyed this book.

Bookgroup: When Breath Becomes Air

Summary: At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.




What I Thought: It was ok. Some amazing parts and some not so amazing parts. Feels horrible to say that as the poor man has passed away but it just lacked something for me... Tragic though.

Bookgroup Book: Islamic Republic of Australia

Summary: In this funny and informative exploration of Islam in Australia, award-winning comedian and writer Sami Shah takes us behind the stereotypes and generalisations to find out who Australian Muslims are, how they live and what they think. Along the way we meet everyone from a woman who runs a ‘speed date a Muslim night’ to a conservative Islamic preacher, and to the founder of a group called Muslims for Progressive Values. The result is an entertaining and fascinating snapshot of Islam down under today.

What I Thought: This was done well and helped explain some things with some good humour thrown in. 

Bookgroup Book: Girl on the Train

Summary: Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them. Their life – as she sees it – is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar. Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train…


What I Thought: This started off a bit slow for me but I did enjoy it. Just so pleased I've actually red a bookgroup book this year!

Bookgroup: Gone Girl

Summary: There are two sides to every story. The Gone Girl is a chilling story in which Nick wakes up to find his wife of 5 years missing, Nick is immediately accused of her disappearance but Nick denies all of it, so where is his beautiful wife?


What I Thought: So much hype around this and I enjoyed the book - but didn't love it. It hooked me from the start but I got kind of bored in the middle then it got me in the end again. Ooh so nasty and a great twist. Contemplating watching the movie now...

Bookgroup: Death Comes to Pemberley

Summary: In their six years of marriage, Elizabeth and Darcy have forged a peaceful, happy life for their family at Pemberley, Darcy’s impressive estate. Her father is a regular visitor; her sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; the marriage prospects for Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, are favorable. And preparations for their annual autumn ball are proceeding apace. But on the eve of the ball, chaos descends. Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s disgraced sister who, with her husband, has been barred from the estate, arrives in a hysterical state—shrieking that Wickham has been murdered.  Plunged into frightening mystery and a lurid murder trial, the lives of Pemberley’s owners and servants alike may never be the same.


What I thought: It was ok - nice to revisit characters and see how the future may lay for them.  Still a few loose ends that weren't tied up for me in this book though. Oh well!

Bookgroup: Bereft

Summary: It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging across Australia. Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men, and train travel is severely restricted. There are rumours it is the end of the world. In the town of Flint, Quinn Walker returns to the home he fled ten years earlier when he was accused of an unspeakable crime. Aware that his father and uncle would surely hang him, Quinn hides in the hills surrounding Flint. There, he meets the orphan Sadie Fox — a mysterious young girl who seems to know more about the crime than she should.

What I Thought: This started off really well and was really intriguing - but then it turned a bit weird... It was ok...

Bookgroup: Caleb's Crossing

Summary: Bethia Mayfield is a restless and curious young woman growing up in Martha's vineyard in the 1660s amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. At age twelve, she meets Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's father is a Calvinist minister who seeks to convert the native Wampanoag, and Caleb becomes a prize in the contest between old ways and new, eventually becoming the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. Inspired by a true story and narrated by the irresistible Bethia, Caleb’s Crossing brilliantly captures the triumphs and turmoil of two brave, openhearted spirits who risk everything in a search for knowledge at a time of superstition and ignorance.

What I thought: I know this is a very popular book and that it is very well written but it just didn't do it for me. Maybe I didn't think deeply enough about the issues or something but the book was just ok... Will be interesting to discuss in a few weeks at bookgroup! 

Bookgroup: Liberator's Birthday

Summary: The Liberator’s Birthday is a story about a group of Irishmen who live around the junction between Redan and Sebastopol to the south of Ballarat. Both districts were centres of intensive goldmining during the second half of the nineteenth century. Mining impacts on all their lives. They have either been involved themselves in raking the riches out of the earth or they have supplied the mines and men with needs. Some mined when every man was his own boss, others had to be content with wages begrudgingly paid by hard nosed managers. The more enterprising formed up into tribute parties and contracted out their services. All were affected by what mining had done to the environment, the muddy roads and paths, the dammed creeks overflowing with all manner of effluent, the flooded back yards and the privies that spilled over to provide a deadly cocktail of diseases which threatened all their lives. In the summer they put up with grit carried from the mining sites by the hot winds and deposited into every crevice, and there wee the flies and mosquitoes which bred on the pools of stagnant water. And there was always the noise as quartz mining replaced alluvial and the city and surrounds were dotted with huge powerful stamper batteries to crush the rock.

These Irishmen gathering in a pub on the corner of Rubicon and Skipton Streets had other concerns too. Prominent among them was the Catholic Church which, unlike the benign and understanding church their ancestors had fought and died for, had become a stern and unbending task master. It had imposed upon them rules and regulations that were hard to understand and even harder to obey.
They had to turn their backs on comrades with whom they had shared the great adventure of gold mining. They could no longer count among their friends men who did not profess the Catholic Church as the one true church, and they could not marry any woman who took their fancy. The children too had to be in schools approved by the church and increasingly these were ones constructed with money that had come from their own pockets.

Some of them were confused, others resentful, but they were also fearful. They knew they could not disobey. To do so would be to place themselves outside the church and dam their souls forever.

They brought their old-world conflict with them to the new land. The Orange and the Green focussed their antagonism on neighbourhood pubs in 1875, at a difficult time on the famous Ballarat goldfields. Jill Blee skilfully surrounds her characters with the flavours of time and place. The mines and mining tragedies loom in the background while the belligerence of miners and lorrymen, together with their imported patriotism and religious bigotry threaten the desire of the Farrell family to achieve wealth and respectability This special day in the life of their pub becomes life itself, filled with contemporary spleen, beautifully described household routines, and relentless social climbing that threatens Tommy Farrell's chance of finding love.



What I thought: I have wanted to read this for years as it is about Ballarat. Unfortunately it didn't do much for me. Pretty boring read and only interesting as I could envision the places described as I live here.

Bookgroup: Philomena

Summary: When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent at Roscrea in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him from her and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. Coerced into signing a document promising never to attempt to see her child again, she nonetheless spent the next fifty years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching for her from across the Atlantic. Philomena's son, renamed Michael Hess, grew up to be a top Washington lawyer and a leading Republican official in the Reagan and Bush administrations. But he was a gay man in a homophobic party where he had to conceal not only his sexuality but, eventually, the fact that he had AIDs. With little time left, he returned to Ireland and the convent where he was born: his desperate quest to find his mother before he died left a legacy that was to unfold with unexpected consequences for all involved. Philomena is the tale of a mother and a son whose lives were scarred by the forces of hypocrisy on both sides of the Atlantic and of the secrets they were forced to keep.

What I thought: I very much enjoyed this. I got angry and sad and happy throughout. Well worth a read - just don't watch the movie as it is very different!

Bookgroup: The Sense of an Ending

Summary: Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

What I thought: Interesting read. Different ending to what I thought. Amazing what can happen years later.  Still pondering...

Bookgroup Book: QF32

Summary: On 4 November 2010, a flight from Singapore to Sydney came within a knife edge of being one of the world's worst air disasters. Shortly after leaving Changi Airport, an explosion shattered Engine 2 of Qantas flight QF32 – an Airbus A380, the largest and most advanced passenger plane ever built. Hundreds of pieces of shrapnel ripped through the wing and fuselage, creating chaos as vital flight systems and back-ups were destroyed or degraded.

In other hands, the plane might have been lost with all 469 people on board, but a supremely experienced flight crew, led by Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny, managed to land the crippled aircraft and safely disembark the passengers after hours of nerve-racking effort.

Tracing Richard's life and career up until that fateful flight, QF32 shows exactly what goes into the making of a top-level airline pilot, and the extraordinary skills and training needed to keep us safe in the air. Fascinating in its detail and vividly compelling in its narrative, QF32 is the riveting, blow-by-blow story of just what happens when things go badly wrong in the air, told by the captain himself.

What I thought: I enjoyed this book but at times it was too technical for me. Still an interesting story. reading this also means I've read ALL bookgroup books for 2014. First time in 7 years!

Bookgroup: The Help

Summary: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

What I thought: I loved it! Sure it was stereotypical but it was a beautiful book. Highly recommend.  

Bookgroup: Catcher in the Rye

Summary: The first-person narrative follows Holden's experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in Pennsylvania.



What I Thought: Loved it and loathed it. Sometimes just wanted to slap him but it also touched on some great teenage angst moments.

Bookgroup: My family and other animals

Summary: The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell, age 10 at the start of the saga, of his family, pets and life during a sojourn on the island of Corfu. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas where the family lived on the island. Gerald is the youngest in a family consisting of their widowed mother, the eldest son Larry, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog. They are fiercely protected by their taxi-driver friend Spiro (Spiros "Americano" Halikiopoulos) and mentored by the polymath Dr. Theodore Stephanides who provides Gerald with his education in natural history. Other human characters, chiefly eccentric, include Gerald's private tutors, the artistic and literary visitors Larry invites to stay, and the local peasants who befriend the family.

What I thought: It was ok. Some funny moments but not really my thing. I won't be rushing off to read anymore of his Corfu books. 

Bookgroup: The Rosie Project

Summary: Don Tillman is getting married. He just doesn’t know who to yet. But he has designed the Wife Project, using a sixteen-page questionnaire to help him find the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver. Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also fiery and intelligent and beautiful. And on a quest of her own to find her biological father—a search that Don, a professor of genetics, might just be able to help her with. The Wife Project teaches Don some unexpected things. Why earlobe length is an inadequate predictor of sexual attraction. Why quick-dry clothes aren’t appropriate attire in New York. Why he’s never been on a second date. And why, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love: love finds you.

What I thought: LOVED IT! So cute and quirky and just a little bit different. Highly recommend!

Bookgroup: Piano Lessons

Summary: In this remarkable memoir, Anna Goldsworthy recalls her first steps towards a life in music, from childhood piano lessons with a local jazz muso to international success as a concert pianist. As she discovers passion and ambition, and confronts doubt and disappointment, she learns about much more than tone and technique. This is a story of the getting of wisdom, tender and bittersweet. With wit and affection, Goldsworthy captures the hopes and uncertainties of youth, the fear and exhilaration of performing, and the complex bonds between teacher and student. An unforgettable cast of characters joins her: her family; her friends and rivals; and her teacher, Mrs Sivan, who inspires and challenges her in equal measure, and who transforms what seems an impossible dream into something real and sustaining.

What I thought: A beautiful book... I have wanted to read this for a while as I heard Anna speaking in Clunes a few years ago. Mrs Sivan - gorgeous! Wish I was more musical now. LOL

Bookgroup: The Book Thief

Summary: It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still...  Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

What I thought: BRILLIANT! So good to start a new year with a fabulous read. This is definitely a slow read where you devour bits piece by piece. So sad yet so beautifully written.