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 Booklovers Meeting, 16th May 2019
Present: Sue, Mary & Denise
Sue Read: My Dear I Wanted to Tell You a novel by Louisa Young. A letter, two lovers, a terrible lie.
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?
Moving between Ypres, London and Paris, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is a deeply affecting, moving and brilliant novel of love and war, and how they affect those left behind as well as those who fight.
Sue also read Sacred Country by Rose Tremaine published in 1992. At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world. A very topical novel!
Mary read a true story by Milan George Vesely , Some Fear Spiders – I Fear the Ghosts in my mind
This book was the telling account of one man and his family and their life and eventual escape from Africa, and the PTSD that they experienced due to the situations that they survived. Not a war story, but having some very similar elements, this is definitely an inspirational recounting of Vesely's life. Vesely wrote “If life is an open book, then mine is a battle-scarred autobiography of exhilarating highs and suicidal lows, all rolled up in a cauldron of terror”. Some Fear Spiders is the recounting of such. A white Kenyan of Czech refugees. Jungle fighter, bush pilot, airline pilot and businessman, Vesely was good at all. Youve got balls, my military trainer said as he taught me to kill men, and they will serve you well. In 1978 military training, bush flying and airline piloting culminated in his Nairobi based reinforced plastics business. Furniture, gasoline tanks, boats and landing craft; all made money. His ocean-going yacht Samantha 39 surpassed all, became his pride and in his own words gave him “wall to wall arrogance”. Then the world caved in. Arrested, accused of theft he was hit by a two by four called corruption and greed. A puppet on a string, tortured and driven to the edge of suicide he all but threw in the towel. He wrote “Torture doesn’t just damage your body, it also scars your mind”
Denise read The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto.
The novel deals with Islamist radicalization through three characters: Monty, Anita Rose and Sunny. The novel follows these three young adults, all from vastly different backgrounds, who, for various reasons, decide to run away from their homes and join the Islamic State.
Anita lives in Karachi's biggest slum. Her elderly neighbour’s shelves of books promise an escape to a different world, and helps her believe that a larger destiny awaits her. When her brother, acquiring wealth in shady ways, sends her to a good school she changes her name to Lala and meets Monty
On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, a rich boy from Karachi, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when Lala shows up at his school, so different, so rebellious, Monty falls hopelessly in love with her. When Lala disappears, he has to find her at any cost
The other main character is Sunny, whose father left India and went to England for a better life. Unfortunately, Sunny’s mother neither loved her husband, her son, or England, and died when Sunny was young leaving Sunny in the care of his father. His father went to great lengths to be accepted as British, but Sunny is a second generation closet gay teenager living a dead-end life in twenty-first Britain, humiliated and isolated). His charismatic cousin persuades Sunny to make something of himself and join the fighters, and even when his cousin abandons him, Sunny takes up the batten and runs willingly and enthusiastically to become a fighter.
These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.
Denise also read Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, published in 1948
It tells the story of a father’s journey, a Zulu pastor called Stephen Kumalo from rural South Africa to and through the city of Johannesburg in search of his son. Stephen Kumalo’s tortuous journey and discoveries he makes in Johannesburg is felt deeply by the reader. It is in a prison cell that Kumalo eventually finds his son, Absalom, who is facing trial for the murder of a white man—a man who ironically cared deeply about the plight of the native South African population and had been a voice for change until his untimely death. Here we meet another father, that of the victim, whose own journey to understand his son eventually leads to his life and grief becoming strangely entwined with Kumalo’s. This is a very powerful novel.
Sue Read: My Dear I Wanted to Tell You a novel by Louisa Young. A letter, two lovers, a terrible lie.
While Riley Purefoy and Peter Locke fight for their country, their survival and their sanity in the trenches of Flanders, Nadine Waveney, Julia Locke and Rose Locke do what they can at home. Beautiful, obsessive Julia and gentle, eccentric Peter are married: each day Julia goes through rituals to prepare for her beloved husband’s return. Nadine and Riley, only eighteen when the war starts, and with problems of their own already, want above all to make promises - but how can they when the future is not in their hands? And Rose? Well, what did happen to the traditionally brought-up women who lost all hope of marriage, because all the young men were dead?
Moving between Ypres, London and Paris, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is a deeply affecting, moving and brilliant novel of love and war, and how they affect those left behind as well as those who fight.
Sue also read Sacred Country by Rose Tremaine published in 1992. At the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world. A very topical novel!
Mary read a true story by Milan George Vesely , Some Fear Spiders – I Fear the Ghosts in my mind
This book was the telling account of one man and his family and their life and eventual escape from Africa, and the PTSD that they experienced due to the situations that they survived. Not a war story, but having some very similar elements, this is definitely an inspirational recounting of Vesely's life. Vesely wrote “If life is an open book, then mine is a battle-scarred autobiography of exhilarating highs and suicidal lows, all rolled up in a cauldron of terror”. Some Fear Spiders is the recounting of such. A white Kenyan of Czech refugees. Jungle fighter, bush pilot, airline pilot and businessman, Vesely was good at all. Youve got balls, my military trainer said as he taught me to kill men, and they will serve you well. In 1978 military training, bush flying and airline piloting culminated in his Nairobi based reinforced plastics business. Furniture, gasoline tanks, boats and landing craft; all made money. His ocean-going yacht Samantha 39 surpassed all, became his pride and in his own words gave him “wall to wall arrogance”. Then the world caved in. Arrested, accused of theft he was hit by a two by four called corruption and greed. A puppet on a string, tortured and driven to the edge of suicide he all but threw in the towel. He wrote “Torture doesn’t just damage your body, it also scars your mind”
Denise read The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto.
The novel deals with Islamist radicalization through three characters: Monty, Anita Rose and Sunny. The novel follows these three young adults, all from vastly different backgrounds, who, for various reasons, decide to run away from their homes and join the Islamic State.
Anita lives in Karachi's biggest slum. Her elderly neighbour’s shelves of books promise an escape to a different world, and helps her believe that a larger destiny awaits her. When her brother, acquiring wealth in shady ways, sends her to a good school she changes her name to Lala and meets Monty
On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, a rich boy from Karachi, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when Lala shows up at his school, so different, so rebellious, Monty falls hopelessly in love with her. When Lala disappears, he has to find her at any cost
The other main character is Sunny, whose father left India and went to England for a better life. Unfortunately, Sunny’s mother neither loved her husband, her son, or England, and died when Sunny was young leaving Sunny in the care of his father. His father went to great lengths to be accepted as British, but Sunny is a second generation closet gay teenager living a dead-end life in twenty-first Britain, humiliated and isolated). His charismatic cousin persuades Sunny to make something of himself and join the fighters, and even when his cousin abandons him, Sunny takes up the batten and runs willingly and enthusiastically to become a fighter.
These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.
Denise also read Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, published in 1948
It tells the story of a father’s journey, a Zulu pastor called Stephen Kumalo from rural South Africa to and through the city of Johannesburg in search of his son. Stephen Kumalo’s tortuous journey and discoveries he makes in Johannesburg is felt deeply by the reader. It is in a prison cell that Kumalo eventually finds his son, Absalom, who is facing trial for the murder of a white man—a man who ironically cared deeply about the plight of the native South African population and had been a voice for change until his untimely death. Here we meet another father, that of the victim, whose own journey to understand his son eventually leads to his life and grief becoming strangely entwined with Kumalo’s. This is a very powerful novel.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
