Putting Christos into Xmas



I'm just home from our Book Club end-of-year dinner out. We booked a table at the Haberfield UTS Rowing Club and ate relatively cheap food on the verandah looking out over Iron Cove, entertained first by a huge double rainbow and its reflection in the harbour, next with the fading of daylight and the increasing definition of electric light, and then with spectacular chain lightning and a couple of seconds of rain.

Somewhere between the fried whitebait and the veal with a kind of marinara sauce (at least that's what I ate) we had our Secret Santa. Astonishingly, three of the six gift-wrapped books were the same. The other three were Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Philip Roth's Indignation. The book selected by exactly half our members as a) likely to be enjoyed by someone else in the group and b) unlikely to be either already owned by them or bought as a gift for this evening turned out to be Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap. And of course once I thought of the title for this post I had to write it.

Posted: Thu - December 18, 2008 at 10:34 PM           |

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