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 15th October 2020 (Held via Zoom)
Vanessa (who was unable to attend) sent us the following notes on the book she’d read, namely,
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Published in 2018 this book as been a great success in America and in the UK where it has featured in The Times best seller list for thirty weeks.
This is Owens’ first novel, although she has written several non-fiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa as well as various natural history publications. This interest is shown in the beautifully crafted descriptions of the setting of the novel. Set on the coast / marshlands of North Caroline, Delia paints an imaginative picture of the landscape and wildlife of that area.
The story centres around a young girl, Kya, whose violently abused mother finally walks out on the family, leaving the last two of her five children (the older ones having already left the home to escape their father) to fend for themselves. Her brother soon leaves as well and Kya is left alone with her father learning to escape his drunken rages by hiding herself in the surrounding marsh area and befriending the gulls and other birds. Eventually her father too disappears and she is totally alone in the shack. Shunned by the local townsfolk as ‘white trash’ her only friend is a black trader who helps her survive. However, the story takes lighten and then darker turns when she is befriended by two local boys, one of whom dies. She is suspected of his murder and arrested. The following telling of her trial is a masterly piece of “did she? didn’t she?” writing. The end is unexpected with several surprises. Vanessa loved this book and practically read it in one sitting. She would really recommend it.
Sue had also recently read it and described it as ‘a really good story’ and enjoyed the wonderful descriptions of natural history. She felt the author was ‘writing it to work out how people can survive in extraordinary conditions.’
Sue also read: On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. The book was written in 1982 and was and the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for that year. In 1987 it was made into a film, directed by Andrew Grieve. Somewhat unusually for an author best known for his travel writing (e.g. Voyage to Patagonia) On the Black Hill is the tale of identical twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, who grow up on a farm in the border country between Wales and England – indeed we are told early in the book that the Welsh/English border runs through the middle of the house, to be exact through the middle of the staircase! They never leave home and their relationship is like that of a married couple; they move into their parents’ double better after the latter die. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed. One of them, Lewis is the stronger of the two. The novel portrays themes such as unrequited love, sexual repression and confusion, social, religious and cultural repression, hate and the historic social values of that era.
Alan read: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke author of the bestseller Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Alan thought this was an extraordinary book though at times found it difficult to know what to make of it. It is the story of a person who has been given the name ‘Piranesi’ and who lives in a house which he has never fully explored and whose space seems endless. Spending his time researching it, he never actually leaves it. He knows that he is the 15th human being to have lived there because he has found fourteen skeletons in various rooms. Many of the rooms contain classical statues and are reminiscent of the etchings produced by the famous artist, Piranesi. There is someone else in the house whom he calls ‘The Other’ and during the course of the book a sixteenth person arrives who becomes known as ‘16’ a character who supplies the narrator with multivitamins. The narrator has a very systematic mind and describes in great detail the wildlife surrounding the house, particularly the birds. His diet consists mainly of fish and shellfish.
According to one reviewer, like a book, the House is a closed-in, private world, filled with symbols—statues, the flight of birds—which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Many of Piranesi’s observations on the nature of the House are also observations on the nature of fiction. “The search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted,” Piranesi thinks. But then he realizes, “The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.” Art and beauty—the statues, Clarke’s novel—are valuable as art and beauty, not because they lead to power or dominion.
Fascinated? Alan was. He found the book totally hypnotic and very moving.
Denise read: London Incognita by Garry Budden. This Arts Council sponsored book ‘chronicles the City of London through the eyes of a desperate and troubled inhabitants, a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two thousand years of history. A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and building burn down, the City’s selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of the capital’. (Review from The Broadway Bookshop.)
Denise describes the book as being full of ‘angry people, people thrown by the wayside’ and often using ‘some very ugly language’. She concluded that it’s a ‘very weird book but utterly compelling’.
Christine read: The Choice by Edith Eger. Although this could be described as ‘another Holocaust account’, it is much more than that since although the first third of the book describes in detail the author’s year in Auschwitz at the age of fifteen, the instantaneous slaughter of her parents, her troubled time there alongside one of her sisters, and her eventual release which makes for harrowing reading, the main premise of the book derives from the remaining two thirds. Here Eger recalls her husband and her family’s flight from Europe, an aspect of this period of history often overlooked – riding on the roofs of trains until they final reach a port and sail for America although they had thought they would be going to Israel. Indeed all their household belongings ended up there. Once in the US, they struggle despite their training and skills, to make a live doing menial jobs, but eventually they succeed in building a good life for themselves. Eger trains first as a psychiatrist and becomes a doctor with a very successful practice and works with people, who like her have suffered great traumas. The key message which the book promotes is that we all have a choice as to how we actually deal with life traumas and it is only relatively late in life (she is still alive, now aged 81) that she comes to understand this fully following a personally very difficult but essential return to Auschwitz. There is a universal message of hope coming from this book and Christine felt that it was a ‘wonderful read’.
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Published in 2018 this book as been a great success in America and in the UK where it has featured in The Times best seller list for thirty weeks.
This is Owens’ first novel, although she has written several non-fiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa as well as various natural history publications. This interest is shown in the beautifully crafted descriptions of the setting of the novel. Set on the coast / marshlands of North Caroline, Delia paints an imaginative picture of the landscape and wildlife of that area.
The story centres around a young girl, Kya, whose violently abused mother finally walks out on the family, leaving the last two of her five children (the older ones having already left the home to escape their father) to fend for themselves. Her brother soon leaves as well and Kya is left alone with her father learning to escape his drunken rages by hiding herself in the surrounding marsh area and befriending the gulls and other birds. Eventually her father too disappears and she is totally alone in the shack. Shunned by the local townsfolk as ‘white trash’ her only friend is a black trader who helps her survive. However, the story takes lighten and then darker turns when she is befriended by two local boys, one of whom dies. She is suspected of his murder and arrested. The following telling of her trial is a masterly piece of “did she? didn’t she?” writing. The end is unexpected with several surprises. Vanessa loved this book and practically read it in one sitting. She would really recommend it.
Sue had also recently read it and described it as ‘a really good story’ and enjoyed the wonderful descriptions of natural history. She felt the author was ‘writing it to work out how people can survive in extraordinary conditions.’
Sue also read: On The Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin. The book was written in 1982 and was and the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for that year. In 1987 it was made into a film, directed by Andrew Grieve. Somewhat unusually for an author best known for his travel writing (e.g. Voyage to Patagonia) On the Black Hill is the tale of identical twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, who grow up on a farm in the border country between Wales and England – indeed we are told early in the book that the Welsh/English border runs through the middle of the house, to be exact through the middle of the staircase! They never leave home and their relationship is like that of a married couple; they move into their parents’ double better after the latter die. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed. One of them, Lewis is the stronger of the two. The novel portrays themes such as unrequited love, sexual repression and confusion, social, religious and cultural repression, hate and the historic social values of that era.
Alan read: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke author of the bestseller Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Alan thought this was an extraordinary book though at times found it difficult to know what to make of it. It is the story of a person who has been given the name ‘Piranesi’ and who lives in a house which he has never fully explored and whose space seems endless. Spending his time researching it, he never actually leaves it. He knows that he is the 15th human being to have lived there because he has found fourteen skeletons in various rooms. Many of the rooms contain classical statues and are reminiscent of the etchings produced by the famous artist, Piranesi. There is someone else in the house whom he calls ‘The Other’ and during the course of the book a sixteenth person arrives who becomes known as ‘16’ a character who supplies the narrator with multivitamins. The narrator has a very systematic mind and describes in great detail the wildlife surrounding the house, particularly the birds. His diet consists mainly of fish and shellfish.
According to one reviewer, like a book, the House is a closed-in, private world, filled with symbols—statues, the flight of birds—which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Many of Piranesi’s observations on the nature of the House are also observations on the nature of fiction. “The search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted,” Piranesi thinks. But then he realizes, “The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.” Art and beauty—the statues, Clarke’s novel—are valuable as art and beauty, not because they lead to power or dominion.
Fascinated? Alan was. He found the book totally hypnotic and very moving.
Denise read: London Incognita by Garry Budden. This Arts Council sponsored book ‘chronicles the City of London through the eyes of a desperate and troubled inhabitants, a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two thousand years of history. A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and building burn down, the City’s selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of the capital’. (Review from The Broadway Bookshop.)
Denise describes the book as being full of ‘angry people, people thrown by the wayside’ and often using ‘some very ugly language’. She concluded that it’s a ‘very weird book but utterly compelling’.
Christine read: The Choice by Edith Eger. Although this could be described as ‘another Holocaust account’, it is much more than that since although the first third of the book describes in detail the author’s year in Auschwitz at the age of fifteen, the instantaneous slaughter of her parents, her troubled time there alongside one of her sisters, and her eventual release which makes for harrowing reading, the main premise of the book derives from the remaining two thirds. Here Eger recalls her husband and her family’s flight from Europe, an aspect of this period of history often overlooked – riding on the roofs of trains until they final reach a port and sail for America although they had thought they would be going to Israel. Indeed all their household belongings ended up there. Once in the US, they struggle despite their training and skills, to make a live doing menial jobs, but eventually they succeed in building a good life for themselves. Eger trains first as a psychiatrist and becomes a doctor with a very successful practice and works with people, who like her have suffered great traumas. The key message which the book promotes is that we all have a choice as to how we actually deal with life traumas and it is only relatively late in life (she is still alive, now aged 81) that she comes to understand this fully following a personally very difficult but essential return to Auschwitz. There is a universal message of hope coming from this book and Christine felt that it was a ‘wonderful read’.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
