Turiff Reading Group: We’re not afraid of Virginia Woolf



2nd February 2004 – Turriff Library, Aberdeenshire    The Turriff Reading Group holds its inaugural meeting and Liz Fraser introduces herself as librarian and our host. We pore over the list of books that she has provided and test out our reading preferences on each other. Barbara suggests a game to help us remember our 14 names. Alan is the only man and wonders if he will be teased mercilessly or spend years reading chic literature. By the end of coffee our heads hurt but we forge a common purpose to read a quality book every month.
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 We soon noticed the benefit of meeting in the library. Reviewing Helen Dunmor’s popular novel ‘The Seige’ about Russia during the Second World War, someone fetched a helpful map that explained a lot of the logistics of the plot. As we informally chatted about books over tea and biscuits, some bright person would pull a volume off the shelf to make a point about an author. Despite the vast resources of Aberdeenshire Libraries at our disposal, however, we found we had to choose our books carefully.
 This was not only a matter of finding enough volumes to go round. Inevitably, there was one person who hated the book and didn’t want to read it and one who had a pre-formed notion of the book’s greatness. Eventually, we stopped and listened to the opinions of our ‘hater’ and found it told us things about our own reasons for choosing books.
 
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5th April 2004     We discuss this month’s book ‘No Great Mischief’ by Alisdair McLeod. The tale of Gaelic-speaking families in Canada leads to the subject of roots and belonging. Jill, as usual, has insights into the novel that are very relevant. This time, talk leads on to our own experiences in an interesting way. Four of our group have their roots in the Doric dialect of North-East Scotland. All the rest are ‘incomers’ – four from England and two from Lowland Scotland. Liz, our librarian, is the only person here who actually belongs to the town where we meet.
 We swap stories about settling here and putting down roots. Elsie amazes us with tales of how her native dialect has been suppressed in the past. She tells us of horror stories from schooldays when the Doric dialect was forbidden to be spoken. We resolve to try and read a novel featuring the Doric dialect. The books of Lewis Grassic Gibbon are discussed but there is a feeling in the group that they are a ‘difficult read’. So we decide to investigate further and come back to this subject. We close the evening on a sore point – a character in this month’s novel visits our county town, Banff, and finds the weather ‘dull and wet’ and the people ‘boring’ – does he mean us?
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 Now that we are a few months old, our trip to the library to meet has become a real social occasion. We have resisted the temptation to chat about books in a general way and structured our evening – first our current book, then we arrange next month’s book. Coffee and chat follows and we try to look into the long-term and think of new areas of reading to plunder – even the Harry Potter novels!
We decided to compromise one month and choose an author who was a prolific writer. Since we were looking for a Scottish author to read at the time, we chose Allan Massie. Our librarian Liz found at least 7 or 8 different titles by him. The plan was that we would each read a different title and compare notes on writing style, subject matter and just the enjoyment of our book.

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10th May 2004    This month’s book ‘The Constant Gardener’ by John Le Carré turns out to be our most controversial yet. Opinions in the group are very strong. A few like it very much because of the author’s strong characterisation and pacy storytelling. Another two or three don’t like the book and can’t ‘get into it’ – especially so when the subject matter (big multi-national corporations in Africa) is so heavy. Since the hero of the novel is a ‘Mr. Average’, we try to project ourselves into his role and imagine how we would survive in a similar crisis – we decide we wouldn’t (again).
 However the talk leads on in a lighter vein to authors and writers we have met. A few have spoken to authors at book festivals. Someone proudly mentions a Scottish author from a visit to the Edinburgh festival. Jeanette trumps us all – “Oh, he was my first boyfriend”. Silence – then laughter.
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 After a couple of months we tried to broaden our outlook. We have thought about non-fiction and biography in particular and Liz, again, produced from nowhere a list of likely candidates. When someone mentioned 20th Century classics such as Evelyn Waugh – ‘Brideshead Revisited’, we felt we had made some progress.
 There is now a waiting list to join the group. We have come a long way since last year when there was little response to the advert in the library for members.