Toronto Book and Brunch Club Meetup

Today I went to the Toronto Book and Brunch Club Meetup.  It was at the Prohibition Gastro House near Queen and Broadview, where the food was just under twenty bucks. (I had the Gros Dejeuner meal.) There were sixteen people, with hardly any no-shows!

We divided into two groups and discussed Joan Didion's book THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING. (I didn't know she wrote a second book about her daughter's death.) Afterward we all wrote book titles on slips and had a draw to choose our next book.  The winner was Camus' existential novel L'ETRANGER.

Margaret and her children came over from Kingston yesterday for a brief visit, and today they took Moira back with them for maybe a week.  I had a DVD she was interested in, of the Stephen Sondheim TV musical EVENING PRIMROSE, but it can wait till she returns. (We would have looked at it earlier but we were busy with the documentary about Christianity's history.)

This evening we saw the DVD of BERTIE AND ELIZABETH, a MASTERPIECE THEATRE production about George VI and the future Queen Mother.  They managed to get through the whole of World War II without once mentioning the Soviet Union! (Who cares if they lost twenty-odd million people?) Nor did they mention that when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich, George let the Prime Minister appear with him on the Buckingham Palace balcony, effectively giving his agreement Royal approval before Parliament could debate it.

As for the 1936 succession, IMHO the British were lucky to learn sooner rather than later that Edward VIII wasn't up to the job, considering that they were about to face a crisis far greater than the choice of his wife.  When Parliament forced his abdication they did the right thing for the wrong reason.