The Port Ellen, Isle of Islay Book Group

From left to right, (back row): Mina Carmichael, Jean Mitchell, Diana Buller, Isobel Morrison, Mavis Gulliver
Front row: Joey Kyle, Maggie Pollard, Adrienne MacDougall, Anne McGilvary

Name:  The Port Ellen, Isle of Islay Book Group

Where from: Port Ellen, Isle of Islay

Size of group (men/women): 9 (women)

How long you’ve been meeting: Over two years

Where you meet: Former hotelier’s house in the village

What your reading group means to you:
Friendship through a shared interest makes for a good life and the combination of good friends, good discussion and good books is unbeatable.

What makes your reading group special:

I’m sure all reading groups consider themselves ‘special’. They are too, because they are made up of a group of unique individuals who, with a shared interest in literature, commit themselves to meeting and sharing their views on a variety of books.
The Port Ellen book group on the Isle of Islay is extra special because of

1) its interesting and eclectic membership
2) its geographical and cultural background
3) its enthusiasm, even passion, for reading
4) its networking with other book groups

Maybe it’s because we are a small rural island community but it seems a natural development for us to reach out, though friends and family, to exchange information about books we have loathed and loved.
(We have even been invited by our local newspaper, the Ileach, to write a regular book review column.)
Suggestions from sons and daughters and links with other book groups have enriched our reading material, and themes we have chosen have been developed and extended across the world.

For example, current affairs stimulated an interest in the lives of the people living in Afghanistan and Iran, and so books like The Kite Runner, Reading Lolita in Tehran and, currently, assorted editions of the Arabian Nights have been recent reads.

Similarly, an interest in stories from China starting with Fallen Leaves, led to The Good Earth, to The Binding Chair and, for the future, to Women of the Silk.

It goes without saying that Scottish and currently contemporary Scottish Literature features in our agenda, and we were lucky to start a run with a visit from Lennox Morrison who wrote Second Chance Thursday which led to Finding Peggy to reading A White Bird Passes and to a promise to help our non Scottish members to read A Scots Quair!!!

We also experimented with the lighter side of literature, reading a selection of Donna Leons novels about detection in Venice. None of us want to become Venetian detectives, but we all want to go to Venice!

We might be lucky here in Islay to have ready access to our many fine malt whiskies but to have access to good literature is even more heart warming.