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Book Club Chat: Cider With Rosie

March 2, 2021

If you joined our book club you most likely have started reading Cider With Rosie (with me!) I have to admit I’m reading slowly. There is a LOT going on in world at the moment. I’ve started a new study term and I’m about to start a new part-time contact job and I’m doing all sorts of things to get my new digs and garden just the way I like it.

Perhaps your life is a bit of a jumble of THINGS like mine? Or perhaps it’s not! Either is good and please do read at your own pace and check back into this post to chat or see what others are thinking about this Laurie Lee classic.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

Above two images by Andy Lovell

From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters. They came scrambling and calling up the steep rough bank, and parting the long grass found me. Faces of rose, familiar, living; huge shining faces hung up like shields between me and the sky; faces with grins and white teeth (some broken) to be conjured up like genii with a howl, brushing off terror with their broad scoldings and affection.

Cider With Rosie Chat Prompts
  1. How are you finding the book so far? Are you enjoying it – or not?
  2. Care to share a favourite line or passage? Or more!
  3. This book is brimming with nature and beautifully captures a child’s-eye-view. Lee says he may have embellished bits due to the passage of time. Do you think that matters?
  4. Does Cider With Rosie remind you of anything else you’ve read?
  5. Are you keen to read more from Laurie Lee?
  6. The language in the book is so descriptive and poetic. Has it made you look at the world around you differently?

Check in below to answer one or more (or none!) of these prompts. You can just share a general view/comment about the book, if you prefer.

x Pip

Top image via Etsy.

 

 

6 Comments

  • Reply Lou Buller March 14, 2021 at 9:36 AM

    Hello Pip,
    Cider with Rosie is a favourite of mine. It’s a beautiful book. I re read it a little while ago. There’s so much that stays with you from it. It doesn’t matter to me at all that he looked through rose tinted glasses at his childhood, maybe we all do that a bit……that’s part of the charm of the book.
    I always loved the two grannies who lived Up top and Down under.
    And Laurie’s mother…..how she was always late for everything……
    You get a real sense of the house they lived in too. I think The Kitchen is one of my favourite bits, The lovely description of the mother, who always ate standing up, cooking pancakes for tea on the range. I so wanted to be in that room! Part of that family! He says how he dreams constantly still of the house and his life in it ‘helplessly bidden, night after night, to return to it’s tranquility and nightmares’. Funny, I sometimes dream of my childhood home and it always unsettled me for the day…..leaves me with a sense of loss and longing.
    Thanks for the video link too. Fantastic! I love Roger Mcgough……another national treasure.
    As I walked out one midsummer morning is also worth reading……about his travels busking with his violin.
    Thanks Pip!
    ??

  • Reply Jane March 8, 2021 at 7:26 AM

    Bringing back so many memories of the Beautiful Cotswolds. Poor Frances.

  • Reply Judith March 2, 2021 at 10:29 PM

    I am loving this book. The video was wonderful.
    I borrowed the book from the library but now I will have to get my own copy.

    • Reply Pip March 3, 2021 at 7:23 AM

      Isn’t the language beautiful?! What a genius Laurie Lee is with words.

  • Reply Kaylene March 2, 2021 at 3:13 PM

    Still waiting for my book to arrive. Looking forward to it very much

    • Reply Pip March 3, 2021 at 7:23 AM

      No rush, Kaylene! I am going very slowly with my reading! x

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