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 17th March 2022
Present: Alan, Christine, Denise, Vanessa
Denise read: The Throwaway Children (2015) by Diney Costello. Set in 1948 this is the story of two sisters sent first to an English, then an Australian orphanage in the aftermath of the Second World War. They are only nine and five years old when their mother marries a violent bully and is persuaded by him to send the girls to an orphanage. She believes that this is in their interest not realising that this will have a drastic impact on their lives. The Children’s Commissioner decides that they, and others and without their families’ consent should be sent to a sister institution in Australia. Rosie who is beautiful ends up committing suicide. Her sister Rita fares better and it is through her voice that the story is told.
This is a fictionalised account of true events. From the 1920s to 1970s, more than 100,000 British boys and girls were sent to Commonwealth countries including Australia as part of an unprecedented child migration program. In reality thousands of these children were forced into labour at remote workhouses where they were often physically and sexually abused. In 2015 a record $24 million compensation was made to ex-students. A disastrous social experiment. Denise felt that the story was not particularly well-written and not a particularly noteworthy account of what is a dreadful story.
Christine read: Blue Postcards (20210 by Douglas Bruton. Set in Paris the 1950s this atmospheric novella, longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022, delicately intertwines three narratives. It uses as a leitmotif the passage of swallows through a summer to mirror the events one year in Paris. It is a meditation on truth and fiction, memory and is a haunting read reaching as it does back into the past and the fate of Jews in Paris as well giving us echoes of Paris in the 50s. The ending is unpredictable but entirely appropriate. The three narratives concern the narrator and his relationship with a young woman, Michelle, who sells postcards from a stall at the base of the Eiffel Tower and from whom he buys a card of Yves Klein’s blue paintings, Henri, a Jewish tailor, who reflects on the fate of his parents in Paris in the war and his relationship with a lady who brings blue flowers and bread to him each day, and finally Yves Klein, the painter, who made his name through his focus on the colour blue. Whole paintings were dedicated to the representation of this colour, named by him ‘International Klein Blue.’ Henri makes a suit for Klein, and as with each item he confects, sews a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers. Tekhelet is the Hebrew for a dye highly prized by ancient Mediterranean civilizations Believed to have been made from ground Hillazon shells, it was viewed as a holy thread that was incorporated into priestly clothing and the tapestries in the Tabernacle.
It is the structure of this novella that makes it unusual and highly readable. Consisting of 500 postcard length paragraphs it provides an alternative way of reading. Episodic yes, but due to the interlinking of the three narratives it does not come across as bitty and key images and symbols thread their way through the whole. Christine found it a most engaging and moving read.
Alan read: Love In The Time Of Cholera (1985, translated 1988) ) by Nobel prize-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marques. Alan felt that this novel has the qualities of a nineteenth century novel. It tells a love story and is set in an unidentified city in Columbia where the author was born. The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Florentino and Fermina fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica. They exchange love letters. But once Fermina's father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the two, he forces his daughter to stop seeing Flore a modern doctor, committed to the eradication of cholera. Meanwhile Florentino having sworn to stay faithful to Fermina, lives a live of promiscuity but makes sure that his former lover will never find out. Her own husband is likewise a philanderer and this complicates the story – despite this, Florentino’s love is spiritually chaste and after Urbino’s death resulting from a fall from a ladder while rescuing his pet parrot from a mango tree (!) he proclaims his love for Fermina and says he has been faithful. After he confesses to one affair, Fermina agrees to give him a second chance and their love blossoms in old age.
Alan says that this is not a classic love story but is so well told, not so much about love but about the way people live their lives. It has echoes of the Roman satirical poet Juvenal (the name the author gives Urbino) and like him he does provides a savage dissection of the society in which the story takes place. Thomas Pynchon, the American novelist writing in a the New York Times, argued that "This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality – youthful idiocy, to some – may yet be honoured, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable, and describes it as a “shining and heartbreaking novel."
Vanessa read: The Madhouse At The End Of The Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into The Dark Antarctic Night (2021) by Julian Sancton. Vanessa is drawn to stories about ice and cold and found this account of the disastrous polar expedition very engrossing. It was already doomed before it started as it was short of funding and could be described as having a motley crew although it did have a good captain in the form of the Belgian, Adrien de Gerlache, who set sail aboard the Belgica, fuelled by a profound sense of adventure and dreams. However he leads the expedition to disaster. Even before the ship cleared South America, it had already broken down, run aground, and lost several key crew members, leaving behind a group with dubious experience for such an ambitious voyage. Among the crew was Frederick Cook, an American doctor who saved many of the crew from the gruesome symptoms of scurvy by finding ways to provide them with vitamin C (Lime juice and the flesh of penguins and seals) and whose relentless optimism buoyed their spirits through the long, dark polar night. Then there was Roald Amundsen, a young Norwegian who went on to become a famous polar explorer in his own right, exceeding de Gerlache's wildest dreams by leading the first expeditions to traverse the Northwest Passage and reach the South Pole.
Vanessa was enthralled by this account feeling it reads like a novel. However, she said it was an extremely well researched account based on first-hand accounts from diaries kept by the as well as the ship’s logbook.
Denise read: The Throwaway Children (2015) by Diney Costello. Set in 1948 this is the story of two sisters sent first to an English, then an Australian orphanage in the aftermath of the Second World War. They are only nine and five years old when their mother marries a violent bully and is persuaded by him to send the girls to an orphanage. She believes that this is in their interest not realising that this will have a drastic impact on their lives. The Children’s Commissioner decides that they, and others and without their families’ consent should be sent to a sister institution in Australia. Rosie who is beautiful ends up committing suicide. Her sister Rita fares better and it is through her voice that the story is told.
This is a fictionalised account of true events. From the 1920s to 1970s, more than 100,000 British boys and girls were sent to Commonwealth countries including Australia as part of an unprecedented child migration program. In reality thousands of these children were forced into labour at remote workhouses where they were often physically and sexually abused. In 2015 a record $24 million compensation was made to ex-students. A disastrous social experiment. Denise felt that the story was not particularly well-written and not a particularly noteworthy account of what is a dreadful story.
Christine read: Blue Postcards (20210 by Douglas Bruton. Set in Paris the 1950s this atmospheric novella, longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2022, delicately intertwines three narratives. It uses as a leitmotif the passage of swallows through a summer to mirror the events one year in Paris. It is a meditation on truth and fiction, memory and is a haunting read reaching as it does back into the past and the fate of Jews in Paris as well giving us echoes of Paris in the 50s. The ending is unpredictable but entirely appropriate. The three narratives concern the narrator and his relationship with a young woman, Michelle, who sells postcards from a stall at the base of the Eiffel Tower and from whom he buys a card of Yves Klein’s blue paintings, Henri, a Jewish tailor, who reflects on the fate of his parents in Paris in the war and his relationship with a lady who brings blue flowers and bread to him each day, and finally Yves Klein, the painter, who made his name through his focus on the colour blue. Whole paintings were dedicated to the representation of this colour, named by him ‘International Klein Blue.’ Henri makes a suit for Klein, and as with each item he confects, sews a blue Tekhelet thread hidden in the trousers. Tekhelet is the Hebrew for a dye highly prized by ancient Mediterranean civilizations Believed to have been made from ground Hillazon shells, it was viewed as a holy thread that was incorporated into priestly clothing and the tapestries in the Tabernacle.
It is the structure of this novella that makes it unusual and highly readable. Consisting of 500 postcard length paragraphs it provides an alternative way of reading. Episodic yes, but due to the interlinking of the three narratives it does not come across as bitty and key images and symbols thread their way through the whole. Christine found it a most engaging and moving read.
Alan read: Love In The Time Of Cholera (1985, translated 1988) ) by Nobel prize-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marques. Alan felt that this novel has the qualities of a nineteenth century novel. It tells a love story and is set in an unidentified city in Columbia where the author was born. The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Florentino and Fermina fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica. They exchange love letters. But once Fermina's father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the two, he forces his daughter to stop seeing Flore a modern doctor, committed to the eradication of cholera. Meanwhile Florentino having sworn to stay faithful to Fermina, lives a live of promiscuity but makes sure that his former lover will never find out. Her own husband is likewise a philanderer and this complicates the story – despite this, Florentino’s love is spiritually chaste and after Urbino’s death resulting from a fall from a ladder while rescuing his pet parrot from a mango tree (!) he proclaims his love for Fermina and says he has been faithful. After he confesses to one affair, Fermina agrees to give him a second chance and their love blossoms in old age.
Alan says that this is not a classic love story but is so well told, not so much about love but about the way people live their lives. It has echoes of the Roman satirical poet Juvenal (the name the author gives Urbino) and like him he does provides a savage dissection of the society in which the story takes place. Thomas Pynchon, the American novelist writing in a the New York Times, argued that "This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality – youthful idiocy, to some – may yet be honoured, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable, and describes it as a “shining and heartbreaking novel."
Vanessa read: The Madhouse At The End Of The Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into The Dark Antarctic Night (2021) by Julian Sancton. Vanessa is drawn to stories about ice and cold and found this account of the disastrous polar expedition very engrossing. It was already doomed before it started as it was short of funding and could be described as having a motley crew although it did have a good captain in the form of the Belgian, Adrien de Gerlache, who set sail aboard the Belgica, fuelled by a profound sense of adventure and dreams. However he leads the expedition to disaster. Even before the ship cleared South America, it had already broken down, run aground, and lost several key crew members, leaving behind a group with dubious experience for such an ambitious voyage. Among the crew was Frederick Cook, an American doctor who saved many of the crew from the gruesome symptoms of scurvy by finding ways to provide them with vitamin C (Lime juice and the flesh of penguins and seals) and whose relentless optimism buoyed their spirits through the long, dark polar night. Then there was Roald Amundsen, a young Norwegian who went on to become a famous polar explorer in his own right, exceeding de Gerlache's wildest dreams by leading the first expeditions to traverse the Northwest Passage and reach the South Pole.
Vanessa was enthralled by this account feeling it reads like a novel. However, she said it was an extremely well researched account based on first-hand accounts from diaries kept by the as well as the ship’s logbook.
Read the notes from previous sessions here.
