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 VIA ZOOM ON 17thTH DECEMBER 2020
Present : Denise, Simon, Alan Christine
Apologies: Di, Sue, Vanessa
Christine read (but has not completed) The Mirror and The Light which is the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. It was published in 2020 and made it to final six in the Booker Prize. The first two novels in the series Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies take the story of Cromwell’s rise from his humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith to becoming King Henry VIII’s Chancellor . The second volume ends immediately after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and the hurry for the marriage of the King to Katherine Seymour, always with the prime motivation of getting a son and heir. This novel takes us to Cromwell’s fall but Christine hasn’t completed the book yet – not by a long way. A very heavy 900 page book, she’s find it a physical challenging read and feels she can only read it in bed so slow progress is being made. She wishes she had downloaded it on to her Kindle. Having said that she says she is enjoying it tremendously and is finding Mantel’s use of language fascinating. Although there is a glossary at the front of the book listing the many characters and their purpose in the book, Mantel mostly refers to Cromwell as ‘he’ (although he is addressed by his name by other characters.) This particular trope is fascinating as it seems to bestow a special almost
God-like quality on the central character. Will this change?
Denise read: Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2017). Greer is an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 with this novel. She describes it as both a love story and a satirical novel. It portrays the journey of Arthur Less who is approaching fifty, who after a difficult breakup plans a round-the-world trip to better understand himself but primarily to avoid attending the wedding of his former lover Freddy, whom he dated for 15 years. Dissatisfied and sad, Arthur then travels to Mexico to a literary festival which is conducted in Spanish, so he spends his time being shown around the city by a local man named Arturo. Arthur then flies to Italy, where his third novel (translated into Italian) is on the shortlist for a prize he knows he will not win. He stays in a lavish hotel and meets the finalists. As the ceremony drags on, Less worries about the quality of his work. He is snapped out of his reminiscences by the news that he has, in fact, won first prize. Next he goes to Germany to teach a short writing course. On his first night he meets a young man named Bastian, and the two begin a relationship. Less spends five weeks teaching and being with Bastian, which distracts him from Freddy’s upcoming wedding. Around him, people fall sick. One night he takes a pill with Bastian and stays up all night dancing. Less leaves Bastian behind and journeys to Morocco to work on his novel. From there he travels to India for a writers’ retreat. He arrives to find that it is a Christian retreat and that it is too loud and bothersome a place to get any writing done. On to Japan to review the local food for an article. He loses his luggage en route and is too early to see the cherry blossoms. In Tahiti, Freddy wakes up on his honeymoon and realizes that he has made a terrible mistake. Less travels back to San Francisco, and Freddy is there to meet him.
If this sounds like a somewhat tedious journey from place to place Denise said she really enjoyed the novel and the way it lampoons the literary establishment. She also said it’s a bit like Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 days. She particularly liked Greer’s writing style. It is comic and episodic. The Guardian reviewer states that ‘Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive.’
Simon read a selection of short stories by Shirley Jackson from her collection Dark Tales reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2017. She was a major influence on subsequent writers in the genre such as Stephen King and others. Simon liked the way the author exposes the weird way in which people think and their relationships. He felt the description was very good and not macabre. For example includes stories dealing with nasty goings on in suburbia, a daily commute which turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, a loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and a concerned citizen who might just be an infamous serial killer.
Alan read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and published in 1818. It tells the story of victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The book was published anonymously when Shelley was 20. Her name first appear in the second edition which was published in Paris in 1821. ‘A very good novel’, says Alan, who was also interested in Mary Shelley’s life. Coming from radically minded parents, William Godwin and the female rights campaigner, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and lived abroad. This extraordinary novel combines the romantic, the Gothic, politics. The eponymous ‘monster’ is one of the most sympathetic characters and his monstrous behaviour is justified on the grounds that he has been mistreated. He is actually educated and cultured quoting Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s lives. Alan had no inkling of what was in the book as he points out since we are so by the mediated images of this monster and his story. It is an epistolary novel with lots of references to literature and history, a novel of ideas, which Alan very much enjoyed.
Apologies: Di, Sue, Vanessa
Christine read (but has not completed) The Mirror and The Light which is the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. It was published in 2020 and made it to final six in the Booker Prize. The first two novels in the series Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies take the story of Cromwell’s rise from his humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith to becoming King Henry VIII’s Chancellor . The second volume ends immediately after the beheading of Anne Boleyn and the hurry for the marriage of the King to Katherine Seymour, always with the prime motivation of getting a son and heir. This novel takes us to Cromwell’s fall but Christine hasn’t completed the book yet – not by a long way. A very heavy 900 page book, she’s find it a physical challenging read and feels she can only read it in bed so slow progress is being made. She wishes she had downloaded it on to her Kindle. Having said that she says she is enjoying it tremendously and is finding Mantel’s use of language fascinating. Although there is a glossary at the front of the book listing the many characters and their purpose in the book, Mantel mostly refers to Cromwell as ‘he’ (although he is addressed by his name by other characters.) This particular trope is fascinating as it seems to bestow a special almost
God-like quality on the central character. Will this change?
Denise read: Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2017). Greer is an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 with this novel. She describes it as both a love story and a satirical novel. It portrays the journey of Arthur Less who is approaching fifty, who after a difficult breakup plans a round-the-world trip to better understand himself but primarily to avoid attending the wedding of his former lover Freddy, whom he dated for 15 years. Dissatisfied and sad, Arthur then travels to Mexico to a literary festival which is conducted in Spanish, so he spends his time being shown around the city by a local man named Arturo. Arthur then flies to Italy, where his third novel (translated into Italian) is on the shortlist for a prize he knows he will not win. He stays in a lavish hotel and meets the finalists. As the ceremony drags on, Less worries about the quality of his work. He is snapped out of his reminiscences by the news that he has, in fact, won first prize. Next he goes to Germany to teach a short writing course. On his first night he meets a young man named Bastian, and the two begin a relationship. Less spends five weeks teaching and being with Bastian, which distracts him from Freddy’s upcoming wedding. Around him, people fall sick. One night he takes a pill with Bastian and stays up all night dancing. Less leaves Bastian behind and journeys to Morocco to work on his novel. From there he travels to India for a writers’ retreat. He arrives to find that it is a Christian retreat and that it is too loud and bothersome a place to get any writing done. On to Japan to review the local food for an article. He loses his luggage en route and is too early to see the cherry blossoms. In Tahiti, Freddy wakes up on his honeymoon and realizes that he has made a terrible mistake. Less travels back to San Francisco, and Freddy is there to meet him.
If this sounds like a somewhat tedious journey from place to place Denise said she really enjoyed the novel and the way it lampoons the literary establishment. She also said it’s a bit like Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 days. She particularly liked Greer’s writing style. It is comic and episodic. The Guardian reviewer states that ‘Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive.’
Simon read a selection of short stories by Shirley Jackson from her collection Dark Tales reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2017. She was a major influence on subsequent writers in the genre such as Stephen King and others. Simon liked the way the author exposes the weird way in which people think and their relationships. He felt the description was very good and not macabre. For example includes stories dealing with nasty goings on in suburbia, a daily commute which turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, a loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and a concerned citizen who might just be an infamous serial killer.
Alan read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and published in 1818. It tells the story of victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The book was published anonymously when Shelley was 20. Her name first appear in the second edition which was published in Paris in 1821. ‘A very good novel’, says Alan, who was also interested in Mary Shelley’s life. Coming from radically minded parents, William Godwin and the female rights campaigner, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and lived abroad. This extraordinary novel combines the romantic, the Gothic, politics. The eponymous ‘monster’ is one of the most sympathetic characters and his monstrous behaviour is justified on the grounds that he has been mistreated. He is actually educated and cultured quoting Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s lives. Alan had no inkling of what was in the book as he points out since we are so by the mediated images of this monster and his story. It is an epistolary novel with lots of references to literature and history, a novel of ideas, which Alan very much enjoyed.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
