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, 21st March 2019
Present: Sue, Simon Mary, Denise, Christine
Simon read: Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
Simon hadn’t quite finished the book but was very much enjoying this classic US novel about American socialites and their world. Primarily set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s. It recounts the love affair between Hollywood actress Rosemary Hoyt and the ‘charming’ Dick Diver. Dick is a psychiatrist who marries one of the patients at his clinic, Nicole, who remains mentally fragile. Rosemary becomes part of the Diver set. She falls under the spell of the glamorous couple and embarks on a reckless affair with Dick The story charts the downfall of the initially successful Dick. His life and career slowly unravel throughout the book.
Fitzgerald skilfully recreates the sensual and emotional pleasures of the Divers' lifestyle. His most persuasive characters are complex self-reflective creations; glamorous, but with a questioning intelligence, a sense of irony and the possibility of true integrity which makes it all the more tragic when they sacrifice themselves for cheap pleasures or worldly effect. Of Dick's exquisite manners, Fitzgerald notes wryly, "often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was, but against how unpleasant it looked". This dichotomy results in his own downfall although Nicole survives, partly due to her own wealth.
Denise read: We by Yevgeny Zamyatine (1923)
This book is a dystopian novel written by a Russian and set 1,000 years after a revolution that brought the One State into being. It was banned by the Soviet censors and was first published in English in the States in 1924. Denise found it very hard to put down and felt that it gives a very clear sense of what a totalitarian system is like.
The story’s protagonist is D-503 (all humans are known by numbers) and is an engineer working on a spaceship that aims to bring the principles of the Revolution to space. The world is ruled by The Benefactor and presided over by the Guardians. Citizens live in apartments made of glass so that they can be spied on at all times. Equality is enforced, to the point of disfiguring the physically beautiful. Beauty and art are a heresy in the One State – to be original is to violate the principles of equality. However, many of the ancient human instincts are still there even though the citizens are lobotomized if they rebel. Falling in love is not part of the plan and ends badly.
The author spent two years working in England and became known for his satires on English life. He became an editor and translator or many famous authors, e.g. H. G. Wells. Denise concluded by saying that she felt the book was “clumsily put together, though it was hard to put down.”
Christine read: Outline by Rachel Cusk. This novel is the first in a trilogy and Christine found it innovative and engaging. The book is set in Greece (apart from the opening chapter which is set on the plane going there.) It is written in the first person, the narrator being a writer who is going to Athens to teach on a writing summer school. Each chapter introduces one or more characters whom the narrator, Faye, encounters during her time there. A rich Greek gentleman she met on the plane subsequently takes her out on his boat and divulges the successes and failures of his life; a group of the students in engage in a writing exercise and in so doing reveal much about their own worlds; then there is her landlady, and another writing tutor. The point about each chapter is that each of the characters talks extensively about their lives, their loves, their ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives, whereas of the narrator we learn very little. She has obviously been through some personal trauma, possibly divorce, has two children, and is questioning who she is in this ‘new’ life she finds herself leading. Above all, as a reader, you cannot help but admire her listening skills and the way she draws out information about the characters she meets. She is an observer and interpreter of these people lives.
The book is innovative in that it is almost a writing exercise in character building. Each of the people the narrator meets is drawn in detail and you enter their lives almost as a therapist might with a client. The one loosely sketched out character is Faye’s own. At its conclusion Christine felt really keen to read the next novel in the series : Transit.
Mary read Fever by Robin Cook (2000)
Robin Cook, MD, physician and writer, is the author of more than 30 books and is credited with popularizing the ‘medical thriller’ with his groundbreaking and wildly successful 1977 novel, Coma.
The protagonist of this novel is a doctor, Charles Martel, who following the death of his first wife from cancer, turns to research into immunology only to find that his daughter is struck down with leukaemia. The cause: a chemical plant conspiracy that not only promises to kill her, but will destroy him as a doctor and a man if he tries to fight it... Fighting almost everyone including his second wife who has been tricked by the authorities into signing an affidavit preventing him from interfering with his daughter’s treatment, he engages in some criminal acts. For example he abducts his daughter from hospital in order to treat her himself with antigens from his own body, a very complicated procedure. All’s well that ends well, however, and Charles is offered his job back, and the recycling plant is ‘sorted’.
Mary had a particular interest in the treatment Charles is attempting to save his daughter. She found, through internet research, that it might prove just as successful as other more conventional solutions and the story ends by saying that there was no proof as to which treament worked better – the oncologist’s chemotherapy treatment in the hospital or Charles’s self-devised treatment plan. Mary thought this was a good read and said she would probably look out for more of Robin Cook’s novels.
Sue read 4321: by Paul Auster (2018)
Sue summed up this semi-autobiographical novel as ‘rather indulgent’ and thought that ‘it should have been much shorter’. Other critics have agreed with her. It is the first new Auster novel in seven years. It tells of the four parallel lives of the protagonist , one Archibald Isaac Ferguson born in New Jersey in 1947. Sue found it hard to disentangle the separate lives as she moved from one version of the character to another and to help herself with this, she had used the device of post-its as bookmarks to keep track of each of them. She did, however, consider each of the four lives to be interesting.
One of Auster’s central premises seems to be that that the essential core of our character gets fixed early in life and remains relatively impervious to the fluctuations of circumstance. What does change with each scenario are the people Ferguson comes in contact with and the influence they exert on his life. Some of these individuals exist in only a single narrative pathway, while others pop up repeatedly, playing different roles in different contexts. The most important of these recurring characters is Amy Schneiderman. So there are multiple love stories about these two though Amy does get away.
Sue is not alone in thinking the novel is too long – four books in one claims the reviewer from The New York Times who considers the book ‘flawed’ but nevertheless ‘a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.’
Sue also read The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017)
This is the story of a young man growing up gay in Ireland. Born to a young mother of 16, he is twice adopted by people who don’t seem very interested in him and doesn’t seem to have been scarred by his childhood. His mother has been shamed by the local priest into acknowledging her pregnancy in front of the congregation of the local church. We later learn that the hypocritical priest himself has fathered two illegitimate children. The book covers the period from the forties to the present time showing the developments in Irish society and culture.
“Fortunately as the novel moves through various events in his life he encounters characters the first is with his childhood friend Maurice Woodbead, who possesses all the boldness and beauty Cyril feels he lacks; the second is with the Dutch doctor Bastiaan, whom Cyril meets when he goes to live in Amsterdam. Bastiaan is a liberator, drawn entirely in light: warm, humorous, self‑accepting, loving and true towards Cyril during their years together. The book rages against the treatment of illegitimacy and homosexuality. Even after the referendum is passed, the ghosts of the past are still present. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel about the search for a sense of self in a changing world and the ultimate, redemptive power of the human spirit.”
(from a review in The Guardian.)
Simon read: Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
Simon hadn’t quite finished the book but was very much enjoying this classic US novel about American socialites and their world. Primarily set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s. It recounts the love affair between Hollywood actress Rosemary Hoyt and the ‘charming’ Dick Diver. Dick is a psychiatrist who marries one of the patients at his clinic, Nicole, who remains mentally fragile. Rosemary becomes part of the Diver set. She falls under the spell of the glamorous couple and embarks on a reckless affair with Dick The story charts the downfall of the initially successful Dick. His life and career slowly unravel throughout the book.
Fitzgerald skilfully recreates the sensual and emotional pleasures of the Divers' lifestyle. His most persuasive characters are complex self-reflective creations; glamorous, but with a questioning intelligence, a sense of irony and the possibility of true integrity which makes it all the more tragic when they sacrifice themselves for cheap pleasures or worldly effect. Of Dick's exquisite manners, Fitzgerald notes wryly, "often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was, but against how unpleasant it looked". This dichotomy results in his own downfall although Nicole survives, partly due to her own wealth.
Denise read: We by Yevgeny Zamyatine (1923)
This book is a dystopian novel written by a Russian and set 1,000 years after a revolution that brought the One State into being. It was banned by the Soviet censors and was first published in English in the States in 1924. Denise found it very hard to put down and felt that it gives a very clear sense of what a totalitarian system is like.
The story’s protagonist is D-503 (all humans are known by numbers) and is an engineer working on a spaceship that aims to bring the principles of the Revolution to space. The world is ruled by The Benefactor and presided over by the Guardians. Citizens live in apartments made of glass so that they can be spied on at all times. Equality is enforced, to the point of disfiguring the physically beautiful. Beauty and art are a heresy in the One State – to be original is to violate the principles of equality. However, many of the ancient human instincts are still there even though the citizens are lobotomized if they rebel. Falling in love is not part of the plan and ends badly.
The author spent two years working in England and became known for his satires on English life. He became an editor and translator or many famous authors, e.g. H. G. Wells. Denise concluded by saying that she felt the book was “clumsily put together, though it was hard to put down.”
Christine read: Outline by Rachel Cusk. This novel is the first in a trilogy and Christine found it innovative and engaging. The book is set in Greece (apart from the opening chapter which is set on the plane going there.) It is written in the first person, the narrator being a writer who is going to Athens to teach on a writing summer school. Each chapter introduces one or more characters whom the narrator, Faye, encounters during her time there. A rich Greek gentleman she met on the plane subsequently takes her out on his boat and divulges the successes and failures of his life; a group of the students in engage in a writing exercise and in so doing reveal much about their own worlds; then there is her landlady, and another writing tutor. The point about each chapter is that each of the characters talks extensively about their lives, their loves, their ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives, whereas of the narrator we learn very little. She has obviously been through some personal trauma, possibly divorce, has two children, and is questioning who she is in this ‘new’ life she finds herself leading. Above all, as a reader, you cannot help but admire her listening skills and the way she draws out information about the characters she meets. She is an observer and interpreter of these people lives.
The book is innovative in that it is almost a writing exercise in character building. Each of the people the narrator meets is drawn in detail and you enter their lives almost as a therapist might with a client. The one loosely sketched out character is Faye’s own. At its conclusion Christine felt really keen to read the next novel in the series : Transit.
Mary read Fever by Robin Cook (2000)
Robin Cook, MD, physician and writer, is the author of more than 30 books and is credited with popularizing the ‘medical thriller’ with his groundbreaking and wildly successful 1977 novel, Coma.
The protagonist of this novel is a doctor, Charles Martel, who following the death of his first wife from cancer, turns to research into immunology only to find that his daughter is struck down with leukaemia. The cause: a chemical plant conspiracy that not only promises to kill her, but will destroy him as a doctor and a man if he tries to fight it... Fighting almost everyone including his second wife who has been tricked by the authorities into signing an affidavit preventing him from interfering with his daughter’s treatment, he engages in some criminal acts. For example he abducts his daughter from hospital in order to treat her himself with antigens from his own body, a very complicated procedure. All’s well that ends well, however, and Charles is offered his job back, and the recycling plant is ‘sorted’.
Mary had a particular interest in the treatment Charles is attempting to save his daughter. She found, through internet research, that it might prove just as successful as other more conventional solutions and the story ends by saying that there was no proof as to which treament worked better – the oncologist’s chemotherapy treatment in the hospital or Charles’s self-devised treatment plan. Mary thought this was a good read and said she would probably look out for more of Robin Cook’s novels.
Sue read 4321: by Paul Auster (2018)
Sue summed up this semi-autobiographical novel as ‘rather indulgent’ and thought that ‘it should have been much shorter’. Other critics have agreed with her. It is the first new Auster novel in seven years. It tells of the four parallel lives of the protagonist , one Archibald Isaac Ferguson born in New Jersey in 1947. Sue found it hard to disentangle the separate lives as she moved from one version of the character to another and to help herself with this, she had used the device of post-its as bookmarks to keep track of each of them. She did, however, consider each of the four lives to be interesting.
One of Auster’s central premises seems to be that that the essential core of our character gets fixed early in life and remains relatively impervious to the fluctuations of circumstance. What does change with each scenario are the people Ferguson comes in contact with and the influence they exert on his life. Some of these individuals exist in only a single narrative pathway, while others pop up repeatedly, playing different roles in different contexts. The most important of these recurring characters is Amy Schneiderman. So there are multiple love stories about these two though Amy does get away.
Sue is not alone in thinking the novel is too long – four books in one claims the reviewer from The New York Times who considers the book ‘flawed’ but nevertheless ‘a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.’
Sue also read The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017)
This is the story of a young man growing up gay in Ireland. Born to a young mother of 16, he is twice adopted by people who don’t seem very interested in him and doesn’t seem to have been scarred by his childhood. His mother has been shamed by the local priest into acknowledging her pregnancy in front of the congregation of the local church. We later learn that the hypocritical priest himself has fathered two illegitimate children. The book covers the period from the forties to the present time showing the developments in Irish society and culture.
“Fortunately as the novel moves through various events in his life he encounters characters the first is with his childhood friend Maurice Woodbead, who possesses all the boldness and beauty Cyril feels he lacks; the second is with the Dutch doctor Bastiaan, whom Cyril meets when he goes to live in Amsterdam. Bastiaan is a liberator, drawn entirely in light: warm, humorous, self‑accepting, loving and true towards Cyril during their years together. The book rages against the treatment of illegitimacy and homosexuality. Even after the referendum is passed, the ghosts of the past are still present. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel about the search for a sense of self in a changing world and the ultimate, redemptive power of the human spirit.”
(from a review in The Guardian.)
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
