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 15th October 2020 (Held via Zoom)
NOTES FROM THE BOOKLOVERS MEETING
Held on Thursday, 15th April 2021 Via Zoom
Present: Vanessa, Di, Alan, Simon, Christine, Sue, Denise,
Simon read: The Warden (1855) by Anthony Trollope. This is Trollope’s first book in the Barsetshire Chronicles and is the story of the Warden’s guilt and the growth of his conscience. This relates to the fact that the Warden Mr Septimus Harding, the meek, elderly warden of Hiram's Hospital and precentor of Barchester Cathedral is in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. The warden, who lives with his remaining child, an unmarried younger daughter Eleanor and performs his duties conscientiously. The story concerns the impact upon Harding and his circle when a zealous young reformer, John Bold, launches a campaign to expose the disparity in the apportionment of the charity's income between its object, the bedesmen, and its officer, Mr Harding whom he aims to take to court. The book is described by Penguin Classics as ‘an affectionate and wittily satirical view of the workings of the Church of England, The Warden is also a subtle exploration of the rights and wrongs of moral crusades and, in its account of Harding's intensely felt personal drama, a moving depiction of the private impact of public affairs.’ Simon liked the way The Warden starts in hesitancy but grows in sensitivity and consciousness. He said ‘it is ultimately about someone being true to themselves’. He felt it was nicely written and led him to feel that he would definitely read more books by Trollope. He wrote over forty novels so Simon is spoilt for choice!
Denise read: Born A Crime (2016) by Trevor Noah an autobiographical account of Noah’s battle to overcome the fact of his birth taking him from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show That fact was that he had a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. His mother educated him as a means of hiding him from a government which could steal him away. The ending of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule meant that Trevor and his mother could embark on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. A mischievous boy and a restless young man,
he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. The structure of the book is of eighteen stories covering such events as subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school.
It is also the story of Noah’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. Denise found it a really funny account of how Noah lived with the blacks in the ‘hood’ and his means of escaping it. This happened when someone gave him a camera. She found his character to be clever, charismatic and felt the book showed a very interesting way of growing up.
Christine read: The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, The Wordsworths, And Their Year of Marvels. (2019) by Adam Nicholson. Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2019 this book by Adam, son of Nigel and grandson of Harold Nicholson, this book is an interesting combination of biography, poetry, art and nature writing. During 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge and their close family members and friends lived near each other in the Quantock hills – Coleridge in a cottage in Nether Stowey and Wordsworth in a grander house Alfoxden loaned to him by an acquaintance and only five miles away. In that time Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison and Wordsworth tackled revolutionary themes in The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, his hymn to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. It is Nicholson’s premise that this great outpouring of poetry was a function of their joint exploration of this area in all weathers, all seasons, by night and by day. Nicholson spent a year walking in the places they walked in and attempting to understand how they reached their view of poetry, their attempt to strip away dead matter and embark on new forms and new concepts. He also investigates the emotional and psychological relationship between the poets and tensions that grew from this. Ultimately their individual poetic voices took very different routes.
Christine enjoyed the book although she felt at times that Nicholson had unwittingly slipped into prose of a Romantic style almost sounding like the poets themselves. She felt that Nicholson produces the most beautiful nature writing and this made her want to revisit this area. She also found his detail research was fascinating especially with regard to the poets’ playwriting years in London and the fact that they were spied upon by the Home Office as being connected to the French revolutionaries.
Di read: The Light We Cannot See (2015) by Anthony Doerr, an award winning American author. This is the story of a French and a German teenager whose lives converge towards the end of the Second World Warand is told in almost 200 short chapters, constantly cuting back and forth between two main characters: Werner Pfennig, a young German boy with an aptitude for radio engineering, and Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young, blind French girl who excels at reading and studying science. Marie-Laure’s father works at the Museum of Natural History and when the Nazis arrive demanding the keys to the museum he decides to move to his uncle’s house in Saint-Malo. Eventually he is caught by the Nazis and taken to a prison camp. His daughter continues to live with her eccentric uncle and joins the Resistance carrying messages in baguettes. Simultaneously, the story of Werner is told and he also finds himself in Saint Malo at the heart of the action.
Sue, who had read the book, commented on the fact that she felt the author was cashing in on a certain style of book set in this historical period. The Guardian’s review of the novel made the comment that ‘it is a weakness of this book that it has many aspects of genre fiction, despite the huge amount of research that has gone into it. There is a worrying even-handedness in Doerr’s treatment of the Germans and the French There are also some strange mistakes: for instance, Niels Bohr was not a German. However, the story itself is gripping and it is easy to understand why Doerr’s book is regarded by many as an epic and a masterpiece.’ However, Di very much enjoyed it, particularly the language which she found beautiful and poetic, dealing particularly well with the aspect of Marie-Laure’s blindness.
Sue read: ‘Still Life’ (1985) by A S Byatt. A book about the life of an extended family and the difficulties of being a ‘clever woman’ in the 1950s and having to make a choice between domesticity and ambition. It is the second in a quartet of novels, the ‘Frederica’ quartet, the first being The Virgin In the Garden. It deals with the relationship between two sisters and with their domestic and intellectual lives. Frederica Potter, 'doomed to be intelligent' goes to Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love whereas in North Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. However, she finds that as a woman her life is still limited. A third character, Alexander Wedderburn, now in London, struggles to write a play about Van Gogh, whose art and tragic life give the novel its central Leitmotiv.
Sue felt the novel was well written with some well observed vignettes. She described the language as ‘beautiful’ and ‘poetic’ however, although she ultimately found the book ‘annoying’ and much of it ‘irrelevant’ even though the key themes were interesting to wrestle with.
Vanessa read: The Testaments Margaret Atwood, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set well into the future and follows the narrative of three of the earlier characters and what happened as Gilead began to crumble. Christine had read this (see Booklovers’ Notes from November 2020) and had been very enthusiastic about it. However, Vanessa who was a great fan of The Handmaid’s Tale felt that this sequel had been somewhat spoilt by the intervening television series which had created strong images of the characters and seemed to drive the narrative of this book.
Alan read: Some Tame Gazelle (1950) by Barbara Pym, her first novel and written when she was a second year undergraduate in the 934. Initially rejected by several publishers, she was encouraged by Jonathan Cape to make alterations and resubmit the novel. The novel tells the story of two sisters and focuses in particular on one of them, Belinda Bede, a spinster now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant but equally unmarried sister Harriet. Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village’s Archdeacon Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although he had preferred to marry the better connected Agatha, a bishop’s daughter. Harriet’s preference has always been to look after the welfare of young curates, although her admirer in the village is the Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her. For the two sisters, their unrequited loves keep them going
Despite great popularity at one time Barbara Pym was eventually dropped by her publisher as she was deemed ‘unfashionable’. Despite this, some of her books have been republished and Some Tame Gazelle was released as an audiobook in 2012. Alan felt she has strengths stating that she has a great ear for what people say and is very good at portraying women and sexual jealousy.
Simon read: The Warden (1855) by Anthony Trollope. This is Trollope’s first book in the Barsetshire Chronicles and is the story of the Warden’s guilt and the growth of his conscience. This relates to the fact that the Warden Mr Septimus Harding, the meek, elderly warden of Hiram's Hospital and precentor of Barchester Cathedral is in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. The warden, who lives with his remaining child, an unmarried younger daughter Eleanor and performs his duties conscientiously. The story concerns the impact upon Harding and his circle when a zealous young reformer, John Bold, launches a campaign to expose the disparity in the apportionment of the charity's income between its object, the bedesmen, and its officer, Mr Harding whom he aims to take to court. The book is described by Penguin Classics as ‘an affectionate and wittily satirical view of the workings of the Church of England, The Warden is also a subtle exploration of the rights and wrongs of moral crusades and, in its account of Harding's intensely felt personal drama, a moving depiction of the private impact of public affairs.’ Simon liked the way The Warden starts in hesitancy but grows in sensitivity and consciousness. He said ‘it is ultimately about someone being true to themselves’. He felt it was nicely written and led him to feel that he would definitely read more books by Trollope. He wrote over forty novels so Simon is spoilt for choice!
Denise read: Born A Crime (2016) by Trevor Noah an autobiographical account of Noah’s battle to overcome the fact of his birth taking him from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show That fact was that he had a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. His mother educated him as a means of hiding him from a government which could steal him away. The ending of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule meant that Trevor and his mother could embark on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. A mischievous boy and a restless young man,
he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. The structure of the book is of eighteen stories covering such events as subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school.
It is also the story of Noah’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. Denise found it a really funny account of how Noah lived with the blacks in the ‘hood’ and his means of escaping it. This happened when someone gave him a camera. She found his character to be clever, charismatic and felt the book showed a very interesting way of growing up.
Christine read: The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, The Wordsworths, And Their Year of Marvels. (2019) by Adam Nicholson. Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2019 this book by Adam, son of Nigel and grandson of Harold Nicholson, this book is an interesting combination of biography, poetry, art and nature writing. During 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge and their close family members and friends lived near each other in the Quantock hills – Coleridge in a cottage in Nether Stowey and Wordsworth in a grander house Alfoxden loaned to him by an acquaintance and only five miles away. In that time Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison and Wordsworth tackled revolutionary themes in The Prelude and Tintern Abbey, his hymn to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. It is Nicholson’s premise that this great outpouring of poetry was a function of their joint exploration of this area in all weathers, all seasons, by night and by day. Nicholson spent a year walking in the places they walked in and attempting to understand how they reached their view of poetry, their attempt to strip away dead matter and embark on new forms and new concepts. He also investigates the emotional and psychological relationship between the poets and tensions that grew from this. Ultimately their individual poetic voices took very different routes.
Christine enjoyed the book although she felt at times that Nicholson had unwittingly slipped into prose of a Romantic style almost sounding like the poets themselves. She felt that Nicholson produces the most beautiful nature writing and this made her want to revisit this area. She also found his detail research was fascinating especially with regard to the poets’ playwriting years in London and the fact that they were spied upon by the Home Office as being connected to the French revolutionaries.
Di read: The Light We Cannot See (2015) by Anthony Doerr, an award winning American author. This is the story of a French and a German teenager whose lives converge towards the end of the Second World Warand is told in almost 200 short chapters, constantly cuting back and forth between two main characters: Werner Pfennig, a young German boy with an aptitude for radio engineering, and Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young, blind French girl who excels at reading and studying science. Marie-Laure’s father works at the Museum of Natural History and when the Nazis arrive demanding the keys to the museum he decides to move to his uncle’s house in Saint-Malo. Eventually he is caught by the Nazis and taken to a prison camp. His daughter continues to live with her eccentric uncle and joins the Resistance carrying messages in baguettes. Simultaneously, the story of Werner is told and he also finds himself in Saint Malo at the heart of the action.
Sue, who had read the book, commented on the fact that she felt the author was cashing in on a certain style of book set in this historical period. The Guardian’s review of the novel made the comment that ‘it is a weakness of this book that it has many aspects of genre fiction, despite the huge amount of research that has gone into it. There is a worrying even-handedness in Doerr’s treatment of the Germans and the French There are also some strange mistakes: for instance, Niels Bohr was not a German. However, the story itself is gripping and it is easy to understand why Doerr’s book is regarded by many as an epic and a masterpiece.’ However, Di very much enjoyed it, particularly the language which she found beautiful and poetic, dealing particularly well with the aspect of Marie-Laure’s blindness.
Sue read: ‘Still Life’ (1985) by A S Byatt. A book about the life of an extended family and the difficulties of being a ‘clever woman’ in the 1950s and having to make a choice between domesticity and ambition. It is the second in a quartet of novels, the ‘Frederica’ quartet, the first being The Virgin In the Garden. It deals with the relationship between two sisters and with their domestic and intellectual lives. Frederica Potter, 'doomed to be intelligent' goes to Cambridge University greedy for knowledge, sex and love whereas in North Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. However, she finds that as a woman her life is still limited. A third character, Alexander Wedderburn, now in London, struggles to write a play about Van Gogh, whose art and tragic life give the novel its central Leitmotiv.
Sue felt the novel was well written with some well observed vignettes. She described the language as ‘beautiful’ and ‘poetic’ however, although she ultimately found the book ‘annoying’ and much of it ‘irrelevant’ even though the key themes were interesting to wrestle with.
Vanessa read: The Testaments Margaret Atwood, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set well into the future and follows the narrative of three of the earlier characters and what happened as Gilead began to crumble. Christine had read this (see Booklovers’ Notes from November 2020) and had been very enthusiastic about it. However, Vanessa who was a great fan of The Handmaid’s Tale felt that this sequel had been somewhat spoilt by the intervening television series which had created strong images of the characters and seemed to drive the narrative of this book.
Alan read: Some Tame Gazelle (1950) by Barbara Pym, her first novel and written when she was a second year undergraduate in the 934. Initially rejected by several publishers, she was encouraged by Jonathan Cape to make alterations and resubmit the novel. The novel tells the story of two sisters and focuses in particular on one of them, Belinda Bede, a spinster now in her fifties who shares a house with her younger, more dominant but equally unmarried sister Harriet. Since her university days, Belinda has loved the village’s Archdeacon Hoccleve, with whom she studied then, although he had preferred to marry the better connected Agatha, a bishop’s daughter. Harriet’s preference has always been to look after the welfare of young curates, although her admirer in the village is the Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, who regularly proposes marriage to her. For the two sisters, their unrequited loves keep them going
Despite great popularity at one time Barbara Pym was eventually dropped by her publisher as she was deemed ‘unfashionable’. Despite this, some of her books have been republished and Some Tame Gazelle was released as an audiobook in 2012. Alan felt she has strengths stating that she has a great ear for what people say and is very good at portraying women and sexual jealousy.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
