The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

Five of us enjoyed discussing our latest read: a memoir that tells the story of Jeanette’s upbringing by Rex, her alcoholic father, and Rose Mary, her mother who is an artist and a hoarder. Our mutual enjoyment of this book set the tone for our discussion which was quite ‘exploratory.’

We welcome 'virtual' members to our group and, for this meeting, we had email and text input from two members who at last minute couldn’t make the date. One loved the book (as did everyone else) and one didn’t. Here’s what they had to say:

Incoming text during our meeting

e-mail received before our meeting

The story tells of a family of six and from the very start it is clear there is something ‘different’ about the parenting. First impressions led some of us to believe they had a life of adventure, freedom, ideology. Possibly in many ways it was all that and more. The ‘more’ is the bit that Jeanette recalls and most of us feel she did that very well. Perhaps though, as our ‘text’ member feels, she may have overdone the hard-life bit and glossed over happier times? Life in the 60’s and 70’s was poorer, harder, simpler, colder, and hungrier after all. Most of us feel that Jeanette chose to present her childhood as she did for good reason, and that she did it very well.

As the tale unfolds it becomes clear that Rex, though highly intelligent (even intellectual), has gambling and alcohol issues. Rose Mary is a qualified teacher who chooses not to teach but to focus instead on her art. Neither of the parents prioritise income, home comforts, feeding or clothing the children. Rex does, however, dream of one day ‘getting’ enough money to build a ‘Glass Castle’ in which they can all live and he has even drawn the plans. Rose Mary is going to be a sought after artist, if only she can bear to part with some of her paintings!

Running from debt or simply needing a new adventure the family travel from state to state living in trailers, cars, an old station, Rose Mary’s mother’s home, Rex’s parent’s home and a dilapidated wooden shack. It is hard to imagine that any of these places could be regarded as home for the family. The children are poorly clothed. Their clothes (and bodies) are dirty and they frequently resort to scavenging to feed themselves. Of necessity they are a highly self-sufficient, mutually supporting group who share what they have and survive.

That said, the strength of family bonds shines through and the family remains a strong unit. We talked about how love conquers all. It didn’t matter to the children how badly their parents brought them up, they still loved them. The relationship between Jeanette and her father was of doting father and loving daughter. Lori was the perfect big sister. Brian the fun loving little brother and everyone adored Maureen (including the neighbours with whom she found her own way to survive by spending time in their households enjoying their hospitality – food and warmth was easily found for Maureen.). We were left unsure about how the children felt about Rose Mary – she was, after all a mother who did very little for her children and who put herself first when opportunities arise.

Jeanette had her trust in her father shaken on more than one occasion but, when he asked ‘have I ever let you down?’ she couldn’t tell him what she wanted to say because she loved him. With her mother Jeanette was more honest, direct, frank and open and we were impressed at how she could do this without being over-emotional and how her mother accepted (and we think respected her for it). When you ‘listen’ to the conversations between Jeanette and her mother you can understand the relationship a little better.

And if you want to know more, click on this link. There is a photo of Jeanette with her mum now and the article expands on the relationship between mother and daughter.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/how-jeannette-walls-spins-good-stories-out-of-bad-memories.html?_r=0

So, would we recommend this book? Yes. For most of us it is firmly on our ‘Good Read’ list and for some of us it’s on our ‘Must Read’ list.

Our next book is Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. We will be discussing this, our Christmas read, on Thursday 21^st January at The Hundred, 8pm.

Book Choices - November 2015

It's time to choose our Christmas read!

A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen: How one man and his cat found hope on the streets

When James Bowen found an injured, ginger street cat curled up in the hallway of his sheltered accommodation, he had no idea just how much his life was about to change. James was living hand to mouth on the streets of London and the last thing he needed was a pet.

Yet James couldn't resist helping the strikingly intelligent tom cat, whom he quickly christened Bob. He slowly nursed Bob back to health and then sent the cat on his way, imagining he would never see him again. But Bob had other ideas.

Soon the two were inseparable and their diverse, comic and occasionally dangerous adventures would transform both their lives, slowly healing the scars of each other's troubled pasts.

A Street Cat Named Bob is a moving and uplifting story that will touch the heart of anyone who reads it.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

The stunningly original and brilliant first novel from storytelling genius Neil Gaiman. Now a six part radio dramatisation on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Under the streets of London there's a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, and pale girls in black velvet. Richard Mayhew is a young businessman who is about to find out more than he bargained for about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his safe and predictable life and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and yet utterly bizarre. There's a girl named Door, an Angel called Islington, an Earl who holds Court on the carriage of a Tube train, a Beast in a labyrinth, and dangers and delights beyond imagining... And Richard, who only wants to go home, is to find a strange destiny waiting for him below the streets of his native city.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a compelling, moving story exploring injustice and mob hysteria by the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on'

Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen - including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man arrives in town to try and piece together the truth from the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk. To at last understand what happened to Santiago, and why. . .

Our next meeting is THURSDAY 26th November 8pm at The Hundred of Ashendon. We will be discussing The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.

Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier

Seven of us sat down for what turned out to be an amiable chat over a glass (or two) and a book. A somewhat crazy book!

The story is based around the experience of a wonderfully eclectic (and very likeable) Cornish household at the time of an attempted political, economic and military alliance between Britain and America. The household consists of Mad Grandmother, Foster Mother and a famous, in her time, actress; Emma, Mad's long suffering granddaughter; six fostered/adopted boys of all ages; Dottie the elderly housekeeper (once dresser for Mad) and Pa. Emma's father/Mad's son who drops in from his home in London where he is a cog in the alliance wheel.

The neighbours are a local farming family and a Welsh recluse who lives in a shack in the woods. Other significant acquaintances include the local GP and a pub landlord.

The events that unfold in the story draw this tiny community into situations that beggar belief. Seemingly they will stop at nothing to protect their environment and to protest at the intrusions made to their lives.

Our group wholeheartedly agree that this book is 'NOT what we had expected from a Daphne Du Maurier!'

It's a great concept but it's not a 'good' book though it is very readable. The concept is a good one, though not particularly well executed. It is like a children's adventure book, a gruesome Enid Blyton full of 'cartoon like' characters. We were left wondering what possessed this wonderful writer to write this particular book. We decided that perhaps she saw it as her opportunity to prove she is no 'Jane Austen'!

It was intimated in some reviews that this is a semi-autobiographical story and as a group we felt that Mad could indeed have been Daphne's personal pen-picture. However, I have since found that the book is dedicated to Gladys Cooper, a leading lady of Gerald Du Maurier, Daphne's actor father and Gladys is the basis of the main character in the book: Mad.

So, here is 'Mad' Gladys:

And, it all takes place in (fictional?) Poldrea, Cornwall. We all tried to place Poldrea and decided it was somewhere between Falmouth and Plymouth! However, there is a small place just outside Par named Tywardreath with a street named Poldrea and, though the street comprises social housing the location fits Daphne's description very well indeed.

This is a book that raises many questions and fails to answer, or challenge, any of them.

Would we recommend it - yes, though not for its literary qualities!

Our next book is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and we will meet to discuss our reading experiences at The Hundred on Thursday 26th November 8pm when our pub Dominoes team will be playing AWAY to the New Zealand!

Book Choices - September 2015

Let's choose our next read:

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her prosperous merchant father brings a young painter back with him from Holland to adorn the walls of the new family chapel. She is fascinated by his talents and envious of his abilities and opportunities to paint to the glory of God. Soon her love of art and her lively independence are luring her into closer involvement with all sorts of taboo areas of life. On excursions into the streets of night-time Florence she observes a terrible evil stalking the city and witnesses the rise of the fiery young priest, Savanarola, who has set out to rid the city of vice, richness, even art itself.

Alessandra must make crucial decisions about the shape of her adult life, as Florence itself must choose between the old ways of the luxury-loving Medicis and the asceticism of Savanorola. And through it all, there is the painter, whose love will change everything.

 

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This is a sprawling family saga, bursting with life, which spans three generations and crosses several continents. At its core, however, is another unorthodox but exquisite coming-of-age story.

The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin. Cal's tale begins, appropriately enough, in Greece (or more precisely Asia Minor)--an Aegean Strasbourg whose sovereignty is claimed by Greece and Turkey. In 1922 brother and sister Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides escaped their war-torn homeland and arrived, as man and wife, in Detroit, America. It is this coupling that ultimately begets their grandchild Calliope and her ambiguous sexuality, as she, or rather by then he, sanguinely notes:

Some people inherit houses; others painting or highly insured violin bows. Still others get Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene on fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.

As Cal recounts the experiences of the Stephanides clan in their new land, from the Depression to Nixon, he unfurls his own symbiotic odyssey to a new sex. Cal's narrative voice is arch, humorous and self aware, continually drawing attention to its authorial sleights of hand, but never exasperating. This is big, brainy novel.

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.

At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane, middle class existence' she had always craved. In her apartment, overlooked by 'a portrait of someone else's ancestor' she recounts poignant remembered images of star watching with her father, juxtaposed with recollections of irregular meals, accidents and police-car chases and reveals her complex feelings of shame, guilt, pity and pride toward her parents.

Our next meeting is THURSDAY 24th September 8pm at The Hundred of Ashendon. We will be discussing Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier. 

60 Books We Have Read

So we have been running for almost 10 years now and over those years we have read, according to my records, 60 books.

Which was your favourite? Add a comment to this blog and let's discuss at our meeting on Thursday 24th September. Here's the list:

2005
Small Island	Andrea Levy
Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian	Marina Lewycka
Toast	Nigel Slater
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
2006
Diary of an Ordinary Woman	Margaret Forster
Close Range	Annie Proulx
The Flame Trees of Thika	Elspeth Huxley
The End of the Affair	Graham Greene
Gentlemen and Players	Joanne Harris
2007
The Island	Victoria Hislop
The Edible Woman	Margaret Attwood
The Time Traveler’s Wife	Audrey Niffenegger
The Other Boleyn Girl	Phillippa Gregory
2008
Offshore	Penelope Fitzgerald
A Thousand Splendid Suns	Khaled Hosseini
Mr Pip	Lloyd Jones
The Mill on the Floss	George Eliot
The Sisterhood	Emily Barr
Notes from an Exhibition	by Patrick Gale
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry
2009
Remember Babylon	David Malouf
The Bolter	Frances Osborne
The Sandcastle	Iris Murdoch
Crossed Wires	Rosy Thornton
A Beginners Guide to Acting English	Shappi Khorsandi
2010
The Boy in the Bush	DH Lawrence (and M.L. (Mollie Skinner)
Chains	Laurie Halse Anderson
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen
Suite Francais	Irene Nemirovsky
Pompeii	Robert Harris
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Stieg Larsson
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle	Monique Roffey
2011
The Concert Ticket	Olga Grushin
Three Cups of Tea	Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Cider with Rosie	Laurie Lee
Amsterdam	Ian McEwan
Pigeon English	Stephen Kelman
The Corrections	Jonathan Franzan
2012
Little Women	Louisa May Alcott
The Red House	Mark Haddon
When God was a Rabbit	Sarah Winman
Scoop	Evelyn Waugh
The Boy with the Top Knot	Sathnam Sanghera
2013
A Young Doctor's Notebook	Mikhail Bulgakov
Pure	Andrew Miller
Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel
Fame is the Spur	Howard Spring
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)	Jerome K Jerome
The 100 Year Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared	Jonas Jonasson
2014
Letters from Skye	Jessica Brockmole
Private Peaceful	Michael Morpurgo
Knots & Crosses	Ian Rankin
The Letter Bearer	Robert Allison
Speed of Dark	Elizabeth Moon
Hard Times	Charles Dickens
2015
The Painter of Signs	R.K. Narayan
Every Day is for the Thief	Teju Cole
Sweet Tooth	Ian McEwan
Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Café	Fannie Flagg

Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

Seven of us enjoyed a lovely sunny (though for some a little chilly) evening on the terrace at Felicity's house, sipping (Mary's birthday) Prosecco and discussing life in a small town just a short train ride from Birmingham, Alabama. I am sure there is very little to compare between the lush green valley we were overlooking to Whistle Stop (which I imagine to be fairly bare, dusty and flat.) That said, this book makes the reader feel they are sat, hearing and listening to the stories that are so well told throughout. 

Yet again we managed to select a book that we all enjoyed. Though one of our members put the complexity of the relationships, and the author's use of timeline, into context by saying she was 'glad there was no exam on it!' 

The stories are beautifully narrated in this wonderful book. Most of us couldn't put it down, but when you had to do so the chapters were so short it was simple to pick back up again. 

The story is told through the relationship that builds between an elderly lady in a nursing home and a disaffected housewife who visits (and befriends) her in the 1980's. One tells and the other and listens to stories of life growing up in Whistle Stop, from the 1920's onward. The themes are diverse: a relationship between 2 women, injury, death and murder, White vs. African American, ageing as a woman and, of course, food! Throughout the tone changes, one minute happy, the next sad!

For the African American people the prejudice and inhumanity of the white people was (is?) a daily reality. This book does, however, illustrate that decent people at all levels of society recognise that this is not right and that kindness and humanity also exists.

Our favourite character was, unanimously, Idgie (and her beautiful family) who exude warmth and are truly respected within the community. The family hold no prejudice and accept people for what, and who, and how they are. So, when Ruth moves in with Idgie, their relationship, whilst never overtly defined, is understood and never challenged.

We also love the character of the book itself. It has little touches that make it special: news bulletins punctuate and separate the stories perfectly and those by Dot Weems are so clever - she blends local small town news with national news and the significance of each piece is left unmeasured. There are also recipes at the end for the reader to try (and enjoy)!

Would we recommend this book? YES, for our group it was an excellent choice, a great book. We are looking forward to seeing the film (or perhaps one day even a trip to Irondale, Alabama? on which Whistle Stop is based and where the annual Whistle Stop festival can be found!)

Our next book is Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier. We will meet to discuss this book on THURSDAY 24th September at 8pm in The Hundred. 

Book Choices - July 2015

Here are our choices for our next read.

The  Ballroom Cafe by Ann O'Loughlin

Sisters Ella and Roberta O'Callaghan haven't spoken for decades, torn apart by a dark family secret from their past. They both still live in the family's crumbling Irish mansion, communicating only through the terse and bitter notes they leave for each other in the hallway. But when their way of life is suddenly threatened by bankruptcy, Ella tries to save their home by opening a café in the ballroom – much to Roberta's disgust.

As the café begin to thrive, the sisters are drawn into a new battle when Debbie, an American woman searching for her birth mother, starts working at the Ballroom Café. Debbie has little time left but as she sets out to discover who she really is and what happened to her mother, she is met by silence and lies at the local convent. Determined to discover the truth, she begins to uncover an adoption scandal that will rock both the community and the warring sisters.
Powerful and poignant, The Ballroom Café is a moving story of love lost and found. 

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck

A novel that fearlessly explores the line between principled defiance and blind fanaticism, John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle contains an introduction and notes by Warren French in Penguin Modern Classics.

'This book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness,' Steinbeck said of In Dubious Battle, which aroused immense controversy when first published in 1936. It follows the fortunes of Jim Nolan, disenfranchised and alone, his family destroyed by the system. Desperate to find his place in the world, Jim joins the Communist Party and becomes entangled in a strike of migrant workers which spirals out of control, unflinchingly detailing the apocalyptic violence that breaks out when the masses become the mob. This fast-paced, compelling novel is at once a brilliant observation of social and political turmoil and a moving story of a young man's struggle for identity. In Dubious Battle explores and dramatises many of the ideas and themes key to Steinbeck's writing.

Rule Britannia by Daphne Du Maurier

Emma wakes up one morning to an apocalyptic world. The cozy existence she shares with her grandmother, an eccentric retired actress known to all as Madam, has been shattered: there's no post, no telephone, no radio - and an American warship sits in the harbor.

As the two women piece together clues about the 'friendly' military occupation on their doorstep, family, friends and neighbours gather round to protect their heritage. In this chilling novel of the future, Daphne du Maurier explores the implications of a political, economic and military alliance between Britain and the United States. 




Our next meeting is tomorrow: THURSDAY 2nd May 8pm at Felicity's house (because it's Summer.) We will be discussing Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg.