Booklovers
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 10th September 2024
Present: Christine, Denise, Dominic
Dominic read: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1989) by William Styron. Written by the author of celebrated novel ‘Sophie’s Choice, this is a book that Dominic has long been impressed by and despite its subject matter believes it to be life affirming, ending as it does, with Styron’s recovery from an acute mental illness. It is an account his trip to Paris in 1985 to receive a literary prize during which his mental state deteriorates rapidly. The depressive symptoms he has been experiencing for some months become acute. Styron mentions as possible triggers his father’s battle with depression and his mother’s premature death from breast cancer. He reaches a point where he contemplates suicide and is actively preparing for that. However, listening to a passage from Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ he becomes suddenly repelled by the notion of suicide and determines to eliminate his depression once and for all. The following day, Styron checks himself into a hospital, where he eventually achieves a full recovery.
As well as exploring his own life, symptoms and reactions, Styron also discusses the effects of depression on the lives of creative people generally, discussing, for example, writers such as Romain Gary, Randall Jarrell, Albert Camus and Primo Levi and also President Abraham Lincoln, and the acdtress Jean Seberg. Styron deduces that people with creative tendencies are ultimately more vulnerable to this disorder. Darkness Visible is renowned for drawing attention to the treatment of clinical depression. and helping to eliminate a lot of the stigma surrounding the disease as it encouraged individuals with the illness to share their experiences and seek help. Dominic describes Styron as a wonderful memoirist and novelist.
Dominic also read: Ulverton (1992)by Adam Thorpe. This book which eventually became a Vintage Classic although it never won a prize, began life unpromisingly being described on publication as ‘mediocre’. However, it quickly became a ‘cult’ novel. It is the story of an English village down the centuries told by various of its inhabitants from a shepherd in the time of Cromwell to a property developer in the time of Thatcher. It's a book of many different voices which lead the reader, according to Dominic, to feel almost as if you are intruding into their lives. It has been said that it feels, often, as though Thorpe has somehow raised the dead. " And Thorpe himself said "At university, I'd dabbled in past life regression under hypnosis, and I remember thinking: I'd love to give a reader that experience, to help them enter somebody else's soul. I picked up the story that eventually became Ulverton's first chapter in my family's village in Derbyshire, and I typed it out, not a word changed. It was almost as if the shepherd was dictating it to me. At first, I put it away. I didn't know what to do with it; it was the time of Amis, of the urban. But then on a walk one day, I had a revelation: the idea that my book's hero would be the place itself. It came up to me from the earth, it really did. The energy was coming up through my legs." The book is told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts. This is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England and is a book that Dominic remains very attached to.
Christine read: Célestine (1996) by Gillian Tindall. Talking of the village voices of a fictitious Ulverton led nicely into Christine’s choice. This is a history book written by a well-established British writer who has also lived in France. She is described as a master of miniaturist history well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research. Tindall one day finds a cache of letters dating from the 1860s in the house she has bought in the centre of France in the Berry region. All but two are letters proposing marriage from various men to the receiver, Célestine, daughter of the village innkeeper (1844-1933). Although she rejected each of the suitors, she preserved the letters throughout her long life. The author uses this source material to look at the society of that time in the village of Chassignolles and moves from the personal and private life of this young woman to look at wider contemporary changes in the society as France moved from an almost wholly rural state to an industrialised one. She studied ancient archives, census records, old newspapers, and prised loose the memories of long-gone ancestors from elderly villages. Although willing to be helpful they saw little point in examining the past. However, Tindall shines a bright light onto the age in which Célestine lived and tells a wonderful story. Christine remembering her own attempts and frustrations to find out the history of a house her family owned in France could understand the author’s difficulties and very much admires the finished work. She believes it is well worth reading if you enjoy writing that can move easily between the public and the private, the detail and the broader picture.
Denise read: The Women (2024) by Kristin Hannah. Hannah is an American author who has written this best-selling novel (soon to be made into a movie) about one woman in particular and several women in general who went to Vietnam to nurse in the 1960s. Hearing the words “Women can be heroes” nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath, sheltered by her ultra-conservative parents in the idyllic world of Southern California, realises that the world is changing and dares to imagine a different future for herself. She joins the Army Nurse Corps, following her brother out to serve in Vietnam. Once there she is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of the war, with each day a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal. She finds herself working under fire, on bases and in field hospitals, to patch soldiers back together. Or not. And, of course, dealing with her own conflicting responses to that. But it is not just the experience of being out in Vietnam that changes her: the real battle is coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protestors and to a country that wants to forget the war. Critics have admired the way Hannah retells the story of the Vietnam war to include everything that women did during that dreadful time and how their experiences were silenced after the war. For example, they suffered from PTSD and they didn’t even get medals for their service though that has now changed. Denise, who had heard the book being recommended by Bill Gates, found the book extremely powerful.
Dominic read: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1989) by William Styron. Written by the author of celebrated novel ‘Sophie’s Choice, this is a book that Dominic has long been impressed by and despite its subject matter believes it to be life affirming, ending as it does, with Styron’s recovery from an acute mental illness. It is an account his trip to Paris in 1985 to receive a literary prize during which his mental state deteriorates rapidly. The depressive symptoms he has been experiencing for some months become acute. Styron mentions as possible triggers his father’s battle with depression and his mother’s premature death from breast cancer. He reaches a point where he contemplates suicide and is actively preparing for that. However, listening to a passage from Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ he becomes suddenly repelled by the notion of suicide and determines to eliminate his depression once and for all. The following day, Styron checks himself into a hospital, where he eventually achieves a full recovery.
As well as exploring his own life, symptoms and reactions, Styron also discusses the effects of depression on the lives of creative people generally, discussing, for example, writers such as Romain Gary, Randall Jarrell, Albert Camus and Primo Levi and also President Abraham Lincoln, and the acdtress Jean Seberg. Styron deduces that people with creative tendencies are ultimately more vulnerable to this disorder. Darkness Visible is renowned for drawing attention to the treatment of clinical depression. and helping to eliminate a lot of the stigma surrounding the disease as it encouraged individuals with the illness to share their experiences and seek help. Dominic describes Styron as a wonderful memoirist and novelist.
Dominic also read: Ulverton (1992)by Adam Thorpe. This book which eventually became a Vintage Classic although it never won a prize, began life unpromisingly being described on publication as ‘mediocre’. However, it quickly became a ‘cult’ novel. It is the story of an English village down the centuries told by various of its inhabitants from a shepherd in the time of Cromwell to a property developer in the time of Thatcher. It's a book of many different voices which lead the reader, according to Dominic, to feel almost as if you are intruding into their lives. It has been said that it feels, often, as though Thorpe has somehow raised the dead. " And Thorpe himself said "At university, I'd dabbled in past life regression under hypnosis, and I remember thinking: I'd love to give a reader that experience, to help them enter somebody else's soul. I picked up the story that eventually became Ulverton's first chapter in my family's village in Derbyshire, and I typed it out, not a word changed. It was almost as if the shepherd was dictating it to me. At first, I put it away. I didn't know what to do with it; it was the time of Amis, of the urban. But then on a walk one day, I had a revelation: the idea that my book's hero would be the place itself. It came up to me from the earth, it really did. The energy was coming up through my legs." The book is told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts. This is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England and is a book that Dominic remains very attached to.
Christine read: Célestine (1996) by Gillian Tindall. Talking of the village voices of a fictitious Ulverton led nicely into Christine’s choice. This is a history book written by a well-established British writer who has also lived in France. She is described as a master of miniaturist history well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research. Tindall one day finds a cache of letters dating from the 1860s in the house she has bought in the centre of France in the Berry region. All but two are letters proposing marriage from various men to the receiver, Célestine, daughter of the village innkeeper (1844-1933). Although she rejected each of the suitors, she preserved the letters throughout her long life. The author uses this source material to look at the society of that time in the village of Chassignolles and moves from the personal and private life of this young woman to look at wider contemporary changes in the society as France moved from an almost wholly rural state to an industrialised one. She studied ancient archives, census records, old newspapers, and prised loose the memories of long-gone ancestors from elderly villages. Although willing to be helpful they saw little point in examining the past. However, Tindall shines a bright light onto the age in which Célestine lived and tells a wonderful story. Christine remembering her own attempts and frustrations to find out the history of a house her family owned in France could understand the author’s difficulties and very much admires the finished work. She believes it is well worth reading if you enjoy writing that can move easily between the public and the private, the detail and the broader picture.
Denise read: The Women (2024) by Kristin Hannah. Hannah is an American author who has written this best-selling novel (soon to be made into a movie) about one woman in particular and several women in general who went to Vietnam to nurse in the 1960s. Hearing the words “Women can be heroes” nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath, sheltered by her ultra-conservative parents in the idyllic world of Southern California, realises that the world is changing and dares to imagine a different future for herself. She joins the Army Nurse Corps, following her brother out to serve in Vietnam. Once there she is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of the war, with each day a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal. She finds herself working under fire, on bases and in field hospitals, to patch soldiers back together. Or not. And, of course, dealing with her own conflicting responses to that. But it is not just the experience of being out in Vietnam that changes her: the real battle is coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protestors and to a country that wants to forget the war. Critics have admired the way Hannah retells the story of the Vietnam war to include everything that women did during that dreadful time and how their experiences were silenced after the war. For example, they suffered from PTSD and they didn’t even get medals for their service though that has now changed. Denise, who had heard the book being recommended by Bill Gates, found the book extremely powerful.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
