Booklovers |
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We started Booklovers because we wanted to talk about the books we’ve been reading and to introduce those we’ve enjoyed to others.
We each take turn to speak about our chosen book and this invariably leads to discussion of broader topics. Four times a year we agree on a shared title to maintain the value of close reading and to hear each other’s interpretations of different aspects of those works.
We are a friendly group of people, meeting on the third Thursday of each month in a member’s home. You’ll find you’re never short of ideas for a new book to read and we warmly welcome others to join us.
For further details, please contact Christine Roberts.
For upcoming meetings, please visit our events page.
We each take turn to speak about our chosen book and this invariably leads to discussion of broader topics. Four times a year we agree on a shared title to maintain the value of close reading and to hear each other’s interpretations of different aspects of those works.
We are a friendly group of people, meeting on the third Thursday of each month in a member’s home. You’ll find you’re never short of ideas for a new book to read and we warmly welcome others to join us.
For further details, please contact Christine Roberts.
For upcoming meetings, please visit our events page.
NOTES FROM THE BOOKLOVERS MEETING HELD ON 21st JANUARY 2021 VIA ZOOM
Vanessa read: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (2018) by Imogen Hermes Gowar. The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock is a historical novel with elements of magical realism by Imogen Hermes Gowar. It had its origins in an award-winning historical dissertation the author wrote while studying archaeology and anthropology. She worked in museums and her writing is inspired by the artifacts she encountered. She then went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. First published in 2018, and nominated for numerous awards, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock follows what happens when a ‘mermaid’ causes chaos at every level of society. Set in Georgian England it features a ship’s merchant who finds one of his captains waiting eagerly on his doorstep. He has sold Jonah’s ship for what appears to be a mermaid. Everyone wants to see Mr Hancock’s marvel and he leaves his ordinary existence and enters the doors of high society, where he meets Angelica Neal, the most desirable woman he has ever laid eyes on... and a courtesan of great accomplishment. Vanessa had bought her copy in a National Trust bookshop and was captivated by its cover. In this instance she felt you could ‘judge a book by its cover’ and felt the story was a very good ‘yarn’ and the depiction of Georgian London and its society to be fascinating..
Sue read: Giver Of Stars by JoJo Moyes (2019). Based in a small mining town in Kentucky this is a fictionalised version of a true event. Alice Wright, Englishwoman, marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.
The leader, and soon Alice’s greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who’s never asked a man’s permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky. They become stronger as women as the story carries on, refusing to be cowed by men or convention. Facing all kinds of dangers in a landscape which is both beautiful and brutal, they commit to their job of bringing books, and so, education, to people who have never had any. Alice’s marriage is annulled and through her work finds a new partner and has a happy marriage. Sue felt the book to be extremely well researched and the characters fascinating and it appealed to her because of her former background as a librarian.
Simon read The Mask of Demetrios by Eric Ambler (1939). Simon felt he should read something by this author who was a very popular writer in his day. Ambler began his writing career in the early 1930s, and quickly established a reputation as a thriller writer of extraordinary depth and originality. He is often credited as the inventor of the modern political thriller and John Le Carré once described him as 'the source on which we all draw.’ According to The Guardian’s quote on the cover of this Penguin Modern classic, the book is ‘still as fresh as new’. It is a thriller about a crime fiction novelist who is on holiday in Istanbul where he meets a colonel who takes him to the post-mortem of the supposed Demetrios Makaloupolos whose body has been fished out of the Bosphorus. A conversation about this notorious criminal ensues, and Latimer is hooked. He feels a need to find out the man’s story. The tale follows him in pursuit of this, to many European locations and many interesting settings.
Simon liked the description of the various settings throughout Europe and the antics of those times: drug dealing (there is a very good account of the process of addiction), blackmail, assassination, etc. He found it very suspenseful and it ends with blackmail and a confrontation. The novel was made into a film starring Peter Lorre.
Christine read Agent Running In The Field (2019) by John Le Carré. This is the author’s final book since he died earlier this year. Christine read it on a break from Hilary Mantel the weight of whose The Mirror And The Light continues to challenge her ability to read it at anything like a normal pace!
Le Carré wrote some 26 novels – not all of them spy thrillers but usually with the subtext of the fallibility of human nature. Alan Massie writing in The Scotsman says ‘He remains angry about corruption, duplicity, treachery, the arrogance and indifference of wealth and power and the readiness to use others as mere instruments.’ The book is very much of its time and its hero Nat is very much Le Carré’s mouthpiece expressing his distress at Brexit and Trump and it feels very up to date in its references to the current world order. Christine felt the book was a little uneven with, in her view, a less than satisfactory ending but overall she enjoyed it a great deal especially its careful exposé of spying techniques. Nat is a first person narrator with whom she didn’t always feel empathetic but generally speaking he is a human being with a heart who is not completely sold to The Firm. He has recently returned from Europe to the UK to what is essentially a downgraded post in a London outback office. At 49, there is a degree of despondency and rejection that permeate his tone and which ultimately is the source of the novel’s ending. That Le Carré wrote this novel when he was 88 is gratifying to Christine but she felt it is sad to think we have recently lost one of our great novelists.
Denise read: Legacy : ‘One Family, One Cup of Tea, And The Company That Took On The World’ (2019) by Thomas Harding. This is the story of the Lyons dynasty, its rise and fall. In the early 1800s Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and made their way to Whitechapel in the East End of London. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to pull themselves out of the slums, creating a small tobacco factory that quickly grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J. Lyons. A truly fascinating family history according to Denise and it is the narrative process whereby the author takes one person from the family and explores their role in the creation of this company. It is essentially social history from 1873 -1978. A company that serviced The Great Exhibition but which after the Second World War suffered from high prices, bad governance and over-borrowing. Denise found it enormously readable enjoying especially the accounts of the main characters (all male), their partners and their children. She certainly made it sound a compelling read.
Alan read: The Fisher King (1989) by Anthony Powell. Powell is best known for his collection of twelve books under the umbrella title of Dance to the Music of Time and this book is his second following the completion of his magnum opus. As the title suggest, the book references the The Fisher King of Arthurian legend, the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. The story is contemporary and actually set on board a cruise ship, the Alecto (another mythological reference) , which is sailing round the British isles. A prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the re-embodiment of the Fisher King legend dovetails the various explanations Powell offers from his competing narrators as to why a talented young dancer would forsake her art to care for a feeble older man. Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship, The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with world mythology, legend, and satire.The novel makes the serious point that myths, old or new, are potential guides to recurring patterns in human behaviour and in human relationships, but that those who look for simple patterns in myths or in life are doomed to confusion. While challenging the reader to know and understand various mythologies, it at the same time a very comic novel. Alan found it interesting, comic and moving.
Di read: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald – her favourite novel and she reminded us all as to why this book has become a modern classic. It epitomises the American Dream and the impossibility of attaining it. Set in the Prohibition era in 1922, the book focuses on Jay Gatsby the eponymous hero who has come from nothing but through his own ingenuity and deception (he was a bootlegger) has become wealthy and owns a fantastic house on Long Island where he gives extravagant parties. The narrator of the book Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbour, becomes friendly with him and introduces him to his cousin Daisy Buchanan who was in fact a former lover of Gatsby. The two renew their relationship and the story spirals out of control when following a trip to New York a road traffic accident with Daisy at the wheel results in the killing of Myrtle, the mistress of Daisy’s husband Jack. Myrtle and her husband George Wilson live in ‘The Valley of Ashes’ outside New York – the name says it all. The book is loaded with references to the inequalities already present in American society in the twenties with visible contrasts between the life of the wealthy in New York and on Long Island and people like Myrtle and her husband.
Although the book had mixed reviews when it was published, as it was generally felt not to be up to the standard of Fitzgerald’s earlier works, it has since become a modern classic of American literature and is studied in schools across the English speaking world. Di who is currently hard at work studying creative writing had returned to the novel for the pure pleasure of reading it again.
Sue read: Giver Of Stars by JoJo Moyes (2019). Based in a small mining town in Kentucky this is a fictionalised version of a true event. Alice Wright, Englishwoman, marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.
The leader, and soon Alice’s greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who’s never asked a man’s permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky. They become stronger as women as the story carries on, refusing to be cowed by men or convention. Facing all kinds of dangers in a landscape which is both beautiful and brutal, they commit to their job of bringing books, and so, education, to people who have never had any. Alice’s marriage is annulled and through her work finds a new partner and has a happy marriage. Sue felt the book to be extremely well researched and the characters fascinating and it appealed to her because of her former background as a librarian.
Simon read The Mask of Demetrios by Eric Ambler (1939). Simon felt he should read something by this author who was a very popular writer in his day. Ambler began his writing career in the early 1930s, and quickly established a reputation as a thriller writer of extraordinary depth and originality. He is often credited as the inventor of the modern political thriller and John Le Carré once described him as 'the source on which we all draw.’ According to The Guardian’s quote on the cover of this Penguin Modern classic, the book is ‘still as fresh as new’. It is a thriller about a crime fiction novelist who is on holiday in Istanbul where he meets a colonel who takes him to the post-mortem of the supposed Demetrios Makaloupolos whose body has been fished out of the Bosphorus. A conversation about this notorious criminal ensues, and Latimer is hooked. He feels a need to find out the man’s story. The tale follows him in pursuit of this, to many European locations and many interesting settings.
Simon liked the description of the various settings throughout Europe and the antics of those times: drug dealing (there is a very good account of the process of addiction), blackmail, assassination, etc. He found it very suspenseful and it ends with blackmail and a confrontation. The novel was made into a film starring Peter Lorre.
Christine read Agent Running In The Field (2019) by John Le Carré. This is the author’s final book since he died earlier this year. Christine read it on a break from Hilary Mantel the weight of whose The Mirror And The Light continues to challenge her ability to read it at anything like a normal pace!
Le Carré wrote some 26 novels – not all of them spy thrillers but usually with the subtext of the fallibility of human nature. Alan Massie writing in The Scotsman says ‘He remains angry about corruption, duplicity, treachery, the arrogance and indifference of wealth and power and the readiness to use others as mere instruments.’ The book is very much of its time and its hero Nat is very much Le Carré’s mouthpiece expressing his distress at Brexit and Trump and it feels very up to date in its references to the current world order. Christine felt the book was a little uneven with, in her view, a less than satisfactory ending but overall she enjoyed it a great deal especially its careful exposé of spying techniques. Nat is a first person narrator with whom she didn’t always feel empathetic but generally speaking he is a human being with a heart who is not completely sold to The Firm. He has recently returned from Europe to the UK to what is essentially a downgraded post in a London outback office. At 49, there is a degree of despondency and rejection that permeate his tone and which ultimately is the source of the novel’s ending. That Le Carré wrote this novel when he was 88 is gratifying to Christine but she felt it is sad to think we have recently lost one of our great novelists.
Denise read: Legacy : ‘One Family, One Cup of Tea, And The Company That Took On The World’ (2019) by Thomas Harding. This is the story of the Lyons dynasty, its rise and fall. In the early 1800s Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and made their way to Whitechapel in the East End of London. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to pull themselves out of the slums, creating a small tobacco factory that quickly grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J. Lyons. A truly fascinating family history according to Denise and it is the narrative process whereby the author takes one person from the family and explores their role in the creation of this company. It is essentially social history from 1873 -1978. A company that serviced The Great Exhibition but which after the Second World War suffered from high prices, bad governance and over-borrowing. Denise found it enormously readable enjoying especially the accounts of the main characters (all male), their partners and their children. She certainly made it sound a compelling read.
Alan read: The Fisher King (1989) by Anthony Powell. Powell is best known for his collection of twelve books under the umbrella title of Dance to the Music of Time and this book is his second following the completion of his magnum opus. As the title suggest, the book references the The Fisher King of Arthurian legend, the maimed and impotent ruler of a barren country of whom Perceval failed to ask the right questions. The story is contemporary and actually set on board a cruise ship, the Alecto (another mythological reference) , which is sailing round the British isles. A prolific romance author Valentine Beals ruminates on the ship's most seemingly incongruous couple: a graceful, ethereal, virginal dancer named Barberina Rookwood and her lover, Saul Henchman, a crippled, emasculated war hero and photographer. Fancifully, Beals imagines Henchman to be the re-embodiment of the Fisher King legend dovetails the various explanations Powell offers from his competing narrators as to why a talented young dancer would forsake her art to care for a feeble older man. Ostensibly a novel about gossip on a cruise ship, The Fisher King is much more: a highly stylized narrative infused with world mythology, legend, and satire.The novel makes the serious point that myths, old or new, are potential guides to recurring patterns in human behaviour and in human relationships, but that those who look for simple patterns in myths or in life are doomed to confusion. While challenging the reader to know and understand various mythologies, it at the same time a very comic novel. Alan found it interesting, comic and moving.
Di read: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald – her favourite novel and she reminded us all as to why this book has become a modern classic. It epitomises the American Dream and the impossibility of attaining it. Set in the Prohibition era in 1922, the book focuses on Jay Gatsby the eponymous hero who has come from nothing but through his own ingenuity and deception (he was a bootlegger) has become wealthy and owns a fantastic house on Long Island where he gives extravagant parties. The narrator of the book Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s neighbour, becomes friendly with him and introduces him to his cousin Daisy Buchanan who was in fact a former lover of Gatsby. The two renew their relationship and the story spirals out of control when following a trip to New York a road traffic accident with Daisy at the wheel results in the killing of Myrtle, the mistress of Daisy’s husband Jack. Myrtle and her husband George Wilson live in ‘The Valley of Ashes’ outside New York – the name says it all. The book is loaded with references to the inequalities already present in American society in the twenties with visible contrasts between the life of the wealthy in New York and on Long Island and people like Myrtle and her husband.
Although the book had mixed reviews when it was published, as it was generally felt not to be up to the standard of Fitzgerald’s earlier works, it has since become a modern classic of American literature and is studied in schools across the English speaking world. Di who is currently hard at work studying creative writing had returned to the novel for the pure pleasure of reading it again.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
