August Recap - Book Clubs and what I've been reading

Hello everyone,

Summer is winding to a close here in London, the days getting a little shorter and a hint of Autumn in the air. I, for one, am quite excited for the change of seasons, particularly in terms of dressing - I miss my jumpers! I have a lot to catch you up on this month, including the two events we hosted and the other books I have been reading outside of our book club read.

This month saw our first ever Buffy’s book club outside of London or New York, though I very much hope it won’t be the last! It was such an honour to be invited to be part of the programming for the Edinburgh Literary Festival, and to be in the city at a time when it was filled with authors, critics, and book lovers. We held the book club at Elliott’s, run by Jess Elliott Dennison, having the whole restaurant to ourselves. We ate crostini and, most excitingly, freshly baked lemon madeleines. It is such a peaceful, cosy space, the perfect venue to discuss Zadie Smith’s NW, my first foray into Smith’s oeuvre, but certainly not my last.

I had to leave Edinburgh the day after our event, but would love to return next year to attend some of the other brilliant talks and events the literary festival provides.

I wore these brilliant trousers from Rohé, an old cami from The Row, my COS sandals that have been one of my best summer purchases, and some amazing earrings from Edinburgh based jewellery designer, Ruth Leslie.

On the 28th, we discussed NW once more at the brand new (it technically doesn’t even open until next week!) The Chancery Rosewood Hotel, on the site of the old US embassy in Mayfair. I had had the chance to visit the hotel a few months prior, when it was still in construction, which was such an unforgettable experience. Touring the hotel and hearing how involved every design choice was so inspiring, and it was amazing hosting a book club in a totally new, luxury space. We had an enormous room to ourselves, the Pavilion, on a corner of the building with windows looking out onto Grosvenor Square, and a bar in the centre, from which we drank champagne. The seating arrangement was perfect, lots of big, comfy sofas and chairs in a circle, and was really conducive to good conversation - I’ll have to find more venues with this sort of layout!

It was so interesting to discuss the same book twice, hearing how different groups opinions differed, and it was wonderful to discuss a book so rooted in London, with other Londoners. We had two North West Londoners in the group, both of whom talked about how much the descriptive sections of that part of the city resonated with them. Two people had actually had the same experience that Leah has in the book’s opening, one just a few weeks ago, of a person coming into their home who they ended up giving money to, which felt like a pretty crazy coincidence!

We had some really great conversations about friendship, particularly female friendships and childhood ones - the idea was raised multiple times of whether we should stay friends with our childhood friends just because of a shared history, or, in the case of Leah and Natalie/Keisha in the book, a shared childhood trauma. Smith does such a perfect job at exploring the complexities of these questions, and of painting a picture of a friendship bound by something unidentifiable, despite both the characters seeming to largely dislike each other, and not be open with one another about the realities of their lives.

Everyone felt the four major characters - Leah, Natalie/Keisha, Felix, and Nathan - were well formed, and we all had different feelings towards them. Personally, my favourite character was Annie, a Soho aristocrat that Felix spends an afternoon with. I felt in a way she might be a voyeur over all of these lives. There is one line in which she says:

“…Or are you one of these optimistic souls who feels they become a new person every seven yers, once the cells have regenerated - blank page, start again - never mind who you hurt, never mind what went on before.”

This felt like a summing up of many of the themes of the book, how the characters are grappling with their identity and either struggling to embrace or actively trying to shed it. The slippy differences of British class identity were explored so well, the many signifiers of movement through the classes, and struggles with racial identity. We felt that no character, except in some ways Felix, was truly happy, and his section of the book was the highlight for many of us.

There was a lot of discussion about form - NW is divided into three sections, each focused on the perspective of a different character. In Leah’s section, the text changes shape to represent certain words and ideas (such as the text forming the shape of a tongue and a set of teeth when a mouth is discussed). Felix’s section, takes a more traditional form, and is almost a novella. Natalie/Keisha’s chapter is broken into many small vignettes, 185 of them, each with a subheading, and then a further chapter that follows her on a walk across North London. One reader last night made the point that the sections describing London became denser as text, reflecting the congested nature of the city. I actually found this switching of form less jarring than I expected - a glowing Washington Post review put it well:

At times, reading “NW” is like running past a fence, catching only strips of light from the scene on the other side. Smith makes no accommodation for the distracted reader — or even the reader who demands a clear itinerary. But if you’re willing to let it work on you, to hear all these voices and allow the details to come into focus when Smith wants them to, you’ll be privy to an extraordinary vision of our age

We all agreed that we needed to read the book again, everyone had missed different moments and plot points within the dense form and fast pace. Almost everyone agreed we would read Zadie Smith again - people who have read her before said White Teeth is the most similar in her back catalogue, set in London, but that On Beauty and The Fraud are also really interesting reads.

To those that did not attend either book club this month, please let me know your thoughts on NW in the Substack comments! I am excited to get stuck into reading more Zadie Smith.

So much gratitude for both our amazing venues this month, and to the Rosewood for allowing us to use both New York’s Carlyle Hotel and The Chancery.

I wore an old shirt from Sir the label, Raey trousers, Herbert Levine shoes and a necklace from Ruth Leslie.

I have had a great reading month outside of the book club pick too. Starting with The Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, possibly the most relentlessly violent book I have ever read. It feel at odds to say I enjoyed a book like this, but I did in the sense that I enjoy McCarthy’s writing style and I am finding myself increasingly enjoying Westerns. The novel follows ‘the kid’ around the Mexico-Texan border, as he joins the Glanton gang, who travel around murdering American Indians. I watched this video on YouTube from Yale University after reading it which was really interesting - a lot of what McCarthy wrote was based on real people, including Judge Holden, the villain of the book (although every character is deplorable, McCarthy captures something incredibly sinister in the way he writes Holden’s character). McCarthy manages to immerse his reader into his characters while giving very little away of their inner worlds, it creates a feeling like you are watching the story play out from above, but his writing style makes you work hard to get to that point of view. It’s a hard read, in both style and content, but I am so glad I finally tackled it.

Another brilliant read was Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. We follow Sonia, a British-Palestinian woman who is working as an actress in London, and visits her sister in Haifa, Isreal. Through meeting her sisters friends, Sonia ends up agreeing to act in a production of Hamlet that will take place in the West Bank. Hammad achieves a lot in this book; family ties on a personal and political level, she tracks important historical events in the Isreal-Palestine conflicts in a way that I found incredibly informative, she (somehow?!) manages to convey huge amounts of Hamlet and the nuances of theatre performances and production. The characters are rich and I felt very connected to Sonia, and I think for anyone who wants to educate themselves further on the history of Palestine, this novel is a great tool to do so.

On holiday last week I read The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, and couldn’t put it down. It feels in need of an editor to chop out around 100 pages of it, as it’s really repetitive at points, but it thankfully didn’t take away from how enjoyable I found it. It’s auto-fiction, and follows Bret Ellis and his very affluent friends through their final year of high school in LA in the 80s. Two significant things play out throughout this year; there is a serial killer at large called The Trawler, and a new boy has started the school in their final year, who Bret becomes increasingly obsessed with. It ends up taking a slasher horror route that I did actually find quite scary, and it has the very graphic violence that we see in other Easton Ellis novels. I really do recommend it though, it’s such a page turner and is worth slogging through (or skimming over!) the repetitive sections.

I also listened to The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett that was approximately 12 years long and I hated it but only decided I hated it once I was about 38279 hours into it and couldn’t give up there so I listened to the remaining 9283820 hours.