The Dining out Group likes to stay close to home in the winter months so we were delighted to learn about a new East Indian Restaurant in Brantford called Rangoli’s. The colourful art on the wall is joyful, as is the music. The food was delicious (a few of us were grateful for a dish of yogurt to cool down the tandoori dishes)! We recommend this restaurant for its good food, relaxed atmosphere, lovely setting and charming staff.
Category Archives: review
Monday afternoon book group
We had a lively first meeting in January with another new member to the group and lots of great books being discussed. We are varied in our tastes, that’s for sure! Added to the books read, one of our members had her newest book just published: Marsha S’s Under Attack (Kidnapped from Ukraine, bk 1).
Thursday night book club discusses McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
January Book Club Review:
The Thursday Night book club started the New year discussing James McBride’s book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. This book received mixed reviews during group discussion.
The book starts with the discovery of a body in a well in the contemporary town of Pottsville Pa. (This storyline is not completed until the last few chapters of the book).
The reader is then taken back to the 1930’s where we are introduced to a multitude of characters who inhabit Chicken Hill a “suburb” of Pottstown. Each individual has a separate story with their own issues, struggles and feelings. Yet, each “short” story, with lots of tangents and back stories, is integrated to the main story line which is about a mixed -race community and how the people interact with each other and unite together in common purpose when it is needed. There is no main protagonist and no central story line. Despite race, religion and class there is a community.
McBride’s uses a blend of literary and historical fiction (Pottstown, Chicken Hill and Pennhurst Asylum are not fictional places) and humour to address black/white racism and antisemitism. His purpose through the book is to “humanize” the complications of discussing race in America, the task of understanding other people, and offering the suggestion that it is possible to jump over the differences that separate us. This is a message novel – “every act of being is a chance to improve the world”.
Too many characters, too many sub plots, too slow moving or an accurate illustration of a diverse community with unique individuals who chose how to let themselves be known and seen by others in a common cause?
Dining Out group loved Twisted Lemon!
The Dining Out Group kicked off the 2024-25 season with dinner at The Twisted Lemon in Cayuga. The food —as always — was both creative and delicious. The service was attentive, efficient and personable. There were 16 of us — happy to catch up with one another after the summer. Our October event is lunch at the Lake House.
Leslie’s book club notes
books books books!
Some recent recommendations from the Monday afternoon book club
The Good Earth — dining out group
The weather was perfect for an outdoor gathering of the dining out interest group last Monday at The Good Earth in Beamsville Ontario.
The food, as always, was intensely delicious, and those who had wine enjoyed that as well.
Best of all was the conversation and friendship.
Your story matters
I can think of no author more qualified to write a book of this nature. Richard Scrimger brings his innate talent and humor to this practical guide that breaks down the elements of writing a good story. As informative as it is laugh out loud funny, anyone who wants to write stories will find his suggestions to be useful. Highly recommended
Marsha S.
Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson: Thursday Book Club review
The Thursday Book Club discussed the book CASTE – by Isabel Wilkerson. It was a “heavy” read in terms of subject matter, researched detail, and shocking truths. Wilkerson compares the centuries old caste system in India, the time bound ‘caste’ system the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 30’s and 40’s, to the caste system beginning with slavery in the US before the US was a country and continuing today.
Her liberal inclusion of horrific stories and historical facts is shocking and disturbing. For example, blacks were still being lynched in the American South up to 1972! She differentiates between caste, race, and class. There is potential for movement with race and class – but within caste – you will never be able to change your position as seen by society.
In spite of the deeply disturbing content, every member at the discussion group agreed that this is a book that needs to be read to help understand the continuing systemic caste system at play in the US today. One observation was it offered a better understanding of why there was such a backlash against Obama compared to the seemingly blind loyalty to Trump.
Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner journalist, was the first woman of African American descent to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Her thesis in Caste is that American culture and economics even today is still built on slavery and its impact. Whereas Germany, shamed by the holocaust, has taken extreme steps to acknowledge, apologize, and honour the victims of the holocaust, many Americans still applaud and honour the Confederate flag and generals who fought to keep millions of blacks enslaved and treated as less than human.
The book opened for our readers insight into this dark side of American history. Though disturbing, they were grateful to have this more fulsome understanding. Conversations included questions about our own treatment of indigenous peoples, the internment of the Japanese, and questions of racial profiling by the police here. As a final question we looked at where we – white privileged women – saw ourselves in the caste system. We all agreed we were pretty much at the top of the heap – the only ones above us were white men…
This is not a book for light reading – but it is a book to help us understand, think about, and respond to current and disturbing issues around systemic racism in American society and politics– and sadly in many other societies around the world.
PS – the book has been made into a movie – ORIGIN by Ava Duverny. Hopefully it will be here soon.
Janet K and Linda T
Monday Book Club: Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay
This was our last ZOOM mtg for the winter and we are all looking forward to “pressing the flesh” in April. But we enjoyed discussing Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay. In the winter of 2008, Lulu, a 62 year old actor, lands a dream role in a Samuel Beckett play.
She has a limited time to learn it but she manages the first few performances and then starts to flub her lines. From there her career and life begin to unravel. Acting has been central to
Lulu’s life. In her sixties now, a sexy, unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks, out of work, humiliated, she escapes to a family wedding and an old friend at Stone Road Station. She decides she is through with drama. She thinks she wants peace. She finds anything but…At the centre of it all is the friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain long-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades. Snow Road Station is not so much a story with a plot. Rather it is a series of life relationships and changes – some harsh and imposed, others slowly emerging and evolving.
Several other characters, mostly men, share in these tangled relationships and we watch them as they emerge and evolve and settle. The difficult work of making maple syrup is a central theme. The work itself is often where the intersection of characters and their conversations occur. Stone Road Station opens with a marriage and the promise of social cohesion. However, things quickly begin to fall apart: the nuptials are threatened, Lulu loses her place in the world. But the story closes with the establishment of new romantic relationships and the birth of a much-loved child — a child who, in many ways, restores Lulu to herself. Everyone gave this book a thumbs up – it is tender and insightful. Losses often open the way
for new and wonderful opportunities at any age.
Linda Tripp
