the still point of the turning world

Annoying W is leaving book group!!1! I did of course say the appropriate things, but also: FINALLY.

However, this leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. The group has had only four members for the last several years, and that means we're down to three - and one of the others is in his eighties and has missed the last two months because his wife has been injured and he couldn't leave her for a couple of hours, so who knows how much longer we'll have him.

We could try and recruit new members (and now W is gone, we would have a better chance to retain them).

But in the last decade or so - well, our city council was the hardest hit by the austerity cuts, and has been having financial problems ever since, and the library budgets have been affected by that. A lot of libraries closed; all of them reduced their hours; and it seems like the book-buying budget got cut pretty hard. We used to be able to get eight or ten copies of a book each month without any real problems, but these days we struggle to get four. If we recruit two or three extra people, the range of SFF books available to us is going to get even smaller.

I'll be sad if we do fold - I've been in this group since the late 1990s, and I think it's good for me to be introduced to new books! Most of them aren't things I would have picked up otherwise. Plus I like the other two members a lot. On the other hand, I'd get one night a month back free, and I wouldn't have to read the rubbish books we sometimes get... If it weren't for the book-availability question I think I'd vote for continuing, but it's been an ongoing faff for quite a while, and so I'm unsure.