Babe in Arms

Due to the October meeting being scheduled for during the half-term (I will figure these things out when A goes to school properly!) we decided to change the date, but to before not after the half-term, as it would give us too little time to read the next book. So the new deadline, ahem, meeting date is the 20th October at 11am. We're reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.

Anne-Marie emailed to say she won't be coming to the next meeting with the camera after all, as she has another library-related engagement, so you can leave the designer baby clothes and the new 'do' till another meeting, if you like. Not that babe in arms isn't classy as a matter of course, of course...

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 22nd September at 11am; sorry but in my previous entry I said the 24th which was nice and confusing!! Could people have their copies of Madame Bovary back by then please, as the library need to redistribute it to another reading group in October.

Anne-Marie will be coming along to the meeting to take some publicity shots for the library website's bit about reading groups. (Don't worry if you don't want your photo taken, or that of your child, it's not obligatory!). She's also suggested that it might be nice to have reviews of books reading groups have borrowed from the library; if anyone wants to email her at amdossett@herefordshire.gov.uk I'm sure she'd be delighted to have a few to sift through.

The busyness has now reached crisis levels, what with moving house and having a new baby. I've been without a phone or internet connection for a while, and it's not much better now as I'm typing with a toddler examining the moles on my right arm and discussing liquorice allsorts and aliens. If this makes no sense you'll understand why! I'll get around to talking about our discussion of We Need to Talk About Kevin soon, as it was a really interesting discussion, but more immediately I need to let you know that I've fiddled with the times and dates of our meetings, and they are now going to be on the Fourth Tuesday of the month from 11-12 in the Children's Centre. It's a later meeting time, which I think will suit those of us with toddlers more.

This means that our next meeting will be on 24th September, which gives us all a bit more time to read Madame Bovary, which is now available to collect at Leominster Library. I've updated Kids Stuff and the Broad Sheep, if anyone can think of any other listings this could go in please let me know.

As most of my typing is one-handed these days (thankfully reading is possible at least with a new baby) this will be a short blog and probably a bit scatty and not very informative.

I had a busy month of May and so did not get to re-read The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which I'd read not that long ago but even still have subsequently forgot most of! I had enjoyed it at the time, in fact I think it's a great read, but I was in the minority among the babe in arms readership this time round. The other readers found it dense and confusing, that the cast of characters was a bit big and that you didn't feel you knew what was going on with them even at the end and that in general it was an unsatisfying read. We were in agreement though that the most memorable storyline was that of the immigrant to America, I found it fascinating, and heartbreaking and infuriating all at once.

The author's view of India as an Indian living abroad and returning home with a jaundiced eye was discussed, and everyone was in agreement that she has a very cynical take on her homeland. She certainly doesn't depict the colourful fascinating place that lucky backpackers get to experience, even with the shock of extreme poverty thrown in; in fact it seems boring at times, as any place can be I suppose, when you live there. It's interesting though that her first novel Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard seems to tick all the boxes of the colourful Indian story; it's funny with crazy characters and a plot that 'could only happen in India' as they say, but even in that story there are darker elements at work.

The theme of people being trapped by their circumstances suggested by the slightly clever clever title means that there is a stifling nature to the story, an air of claustrophobia. Characters are trapped by caste, by social pretension, by failed hopes and poverty and it doesn't seem like there's much hope for them to be released from one generation to the next. Some of the themes pursued by the author in this novel were similar to those of The God of Small Things, which drew a much more positive response, despite not being at all a straightforward read. The quality of the prose in this novel was also praised, so it is hard to say why readers didn't like it...in the end they just didn't find that the characters were drawn deeply enough to click with and understand or even care about. I think I'm going to have to read it again...

Our book for July is the joyful summertime read We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

By the way if anyone still has any Inheritance books still out can they drop them back to the library asap please.

The following reading list has been chosen from what was available to book in the next few months from the Herefordshire Libraries readers' groups book sets. (You may notice the authors are in alphabetical order, I just put forward suggestions and booked what was available) Hope there's something in here for everyone, so to speak, or that the titles might challenge us to read outside our comfort zones, in a good way! Some titles like The Catcher in the Rye might seem a bit obvious, but if something is regarded as a classic it's always worth returning to and maybe re-evaluating. There are a couple that I've read and wouldn't mind reading again, one that I'm not sure I want to read again, but it got such rave reviews I might change my mind, and a couple I've never read at all, so it will be an interesting few reading months ahead I think. So from July we've got:

July: Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Sept: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Oct: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Nov: Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang
Dec: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Jan: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
Feb: Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
March: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Another short(ish) and sweet blog to follow…my backache has been joined by swollen ankles (what a cliché!) but enough about me…

We met yesterday to talk about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; the first instalment in an autobiography that runs to several volumes. Angelou is a national treasure in the US, especially since she was the inaugural poet for Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president in 1992. Although she campaigned for Hillary initially this time round, I recall being aware of her emotional response to Barack Obama’s ultimate win over McCain. She said something along the lines of how amazing it was that such a thing could happen in her lifetime.

Having finally read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I can concur that I too am amazed that America would elect a black president in the same lifetime as that of the author. A series of almost disconnected memories from her childhood and adolescence, the primary story that comes across is of a disadvantaged population living in almost total segregation in the American South.

Some readers had finished the book, some not and one had read it years ago, but even so the general round of opinion was about the same. We were all touched by the story, and fascinated by aspects of it, especially her ability to render a situation almost tangible (for example you felt the exhaustion of the cotton pickers as they came into her grandmother’s store after a day’s picking, and you also felt their hope as well the following morning) and to write believably in dialect. There were elements of the story that were truly shocking: even though we knew that in the deep south the black population got a raw deal, it’s still something to read of the casual way their situation was dealt with by the whites, a dentist refusing to treat her even though she was in awful pain, saying that he’d rather treat a dog than a black person. The ignorance of the woman for whom Angelou worked when she was about 12 who decided to rename her for her own convenience, as Angelou’s given name was too long; and the arrogance of people in general who always expected black people to give up their seats for whites, and the many other innumerable slights and insults that made up normal interaction between people of both colours. No wonder Angelou doubted when she was young that white people were human at all.

The story of Angelou’s relationship with her mother and father is an interesting one. Intriguingly, she seems to hold little bitterness towards her parents, even though they effectively abandoned their responsibilities towards her and her brother, letting them be raised by a competent but not very outwardly loving grandmother; a large part of our discussion revolved around this strange fact. Maya and her brother idealised their parents, particularly their mother. Perhaps this was understandable when they were children, but there is little enough explanation offered either for why they were so lax, or how their offspring felt about it. Angelou was seriously affected by being raped by her mother’s lover when she was eight and living with her mother for a time, and when the sympathy from her mother’s family ran out she had to return to her grandmother’s store, a ball of guilt and misapprehensions, she couldn’t speak for several years to anyone other than her brother and she certainly could not bring herself to tell her grandmother what had happened.

Her interaction with her father was bizarre, in that he really did not seem to care what happened to her or her brother; even after his fiancé attempted to stab her and she ran away, living rough for about a month before returning to her mother in San Francisco, neither parent seemed to have enquired of the other as to her circumstances or how she was, even though her father knew she had run away with a stab wound. Maybe we cosset our children too much!

One reader asked the question as to whether we got from the memoir what was the core reason that Angelou managed not to be subsumed in poverty for her lifetime, how it was that she has risen from being the impoverished grandchild of a store owner in a tiny segregated town to being where she is today. The lift up isn’t obvious, and the memoir ends on a particularly bleak note; after a very unsatisfactory sexual encounter she becomes a mother at the age of sixteen. But we all agreed that she showed unusual stubbornness and inner strength from a young age, and this coupled with her intellectual strength must be what got her through.

Readers were generally positive about this book; there was a lot of humour in there which made it easier to read and got us closer to the essence of Maya Angelou herself. We would like to find out more about what happened to her and her family, particularly her brother, but having said that, no-one showed any inclination to rush out and get the next volume! This is partly due to the perennial backlog of books to be read and the little time there is to read them in…

Speaking of which, our next choice is The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Happy reading!

Many apologies for the tardiness of this blog, it seems like every time I sit down to write it I either get backache or fall asleep!!! Such is the way when Number 2 (as he/she is affectionately known by Number 1) is due to make an appearance in just a couple of weeks.

So I’m going to make this one short. We (a small group of 2 it being the Easter Holidays) loved Silas Marner and have vowed to read more George Eliot…from the odd conversation I’ve had with other members of the group the reaction ranged from the same as ours, to an inability to get to grips with it due to very small babies and very small print in the volume being read…I did find that I needed to concentrate more on the writing, especially on those long 19th Century sentences, and could only read it when there were no other distractions at all. But it’s a short novel, so that cancels out the extra work that I put in (and maybe should be putting into everything I read anyway?). Kathy found the digressions in the text where the author gives us the benefit so to speak of her own opinions a bit annoying…I forgot to ask her then if she had ever read Anthony Trollope….his novels would be half the size and a lot better for it too if he had cut out the moralising nonsense!!

Anyway I have a lot more to say on Silas Marner and will in comments when I get the chance, but my back is protesting and I’ll have to go… Please make up for this unworthy contribution by adding your own comments, it would make up for my shortcomings!

Our book for May is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, available as usual from Leominster Library.

Anne Marie has asked if anyone has any ideas or suggestions for new book sets to be ordered for the readers’ groups? If you have and leave them in a comment here, I’ll pass them on to her. I wouldn’t mind having a chat at the next meeting about booking selections for the 2nd half of the year; the choice is available as a PDF from the Herefordshire Libraries website. Here are some books they already have it in mind to order:

The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak
One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson
Dreams of My Father - Barack Obama
The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry
Somewhere towards the End- Diane Athill
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Rebecca- Daphne Du Maurier

There’s a couple in there I’d definitely love to read with the group.

On March 3rd we discussed The Road Home by Rose Tremain, winner of last year’s Orange Prize for fiction. It received a general all round thumbs up from the babe in arms readership, though there are a couple of readers still getting through it.

The novel is about Lev, who migrates to England some time in 2004 to 2005 from Eastern Europe, shortly after borders are opened to the new member states of the EU. The story charts his progress from arrival in the UK, exploring what made him leave his home in the first place, what his expectations of life in England were, and the sometimes tangential relationship those expectations had with reality.

Some of us had read Tremain before; last year we read The Colour (see archive for discussion) which was for most of the readership an introduction to Rose Tremain. As we noted last year, she is an author who is very difficult to pigeon hole; going for example from the realm of historical novel to a very contemporary one without much obvious difficulty. She is known, however, for her meticulous research, and I find she does not shy away from making her characters or at least aspects of them, unlikeable.

Any criticism of this novel that emerged from our discussion stemmed mainly from the fact that although the characterisation in most cases was thorough, there were a few glitches where a character’s actions just did not make sense. The most obvious example of this is the main character, Lev, himself. Even though as a reader we are given a privileged view into his life and his history, Lev still acts in a way that is hard to fathom from time to time. He barely reacts to a great deal of negativity that he encounters, for example having to sleep rough a couple of times as B&B’s were so much more expensive than he had expected. He encounters a certain patronising attitude from the police, and racism from several quarters, yet when it comes to his English girlfriend Sophie, he turns from being laid back and likeable to being volatile and downright dangerous. Even though he displays a certain lack of confidence as regards her own intentions towards him, his outbursts towards her, one where he practically assaults her in public and one in the aftermath of which he is guiltily unsure whether he has crossed a line into rape, seem to come out of the blue and aren’t the result of obsessing or simmering resentment.

Sophie herself is another character that didn’t quite follow through for some of us. While there are some beautiful descriptions of Lev’s passion for her, she didn’t really make it out of the realm of ordinary, which made it hard to understand why a prep chef in admittedly a quality establishment should be so well connected: she’s friends with a lot of up and coming artists, designers and playwrights, and apart from the fact that she played the guitar as a hobby and had aspirations to be a chef in her own right it was hard to get a good picture of her. Her volunteering role in an old people’s home was very worthy but it didn’t take her long to drop that when she got a glamorous boyfriend.

Most of the other characterisations were wonderful though and kept the story moving quite nicely. Rudi, Lev’s larger than life friend back home deservedly achieved near mythical status with Lev’s new friends through Lev’s recounting of their madcap often vodka-fuelled adventures. Lydia, Lev’s companion on the bus journey to London and his saviour several times once there was another great character; her uncomfortable honesty, both about her shortcomings and her questionable successes displayed subtly a very dissatisfied, put-upon person, who was undoubtedly needy and irritating while deserving of our sympathy. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Lev, until he overstepped the mark and from then on she refused to contact him. It was noted by our readers that not all loose ends were tidied up at the close of the novel, which made it so much more satisfying if they had been…there was no closure with Sophie, no occasion where poor Lydia got the respect she deserved.

GK Ashe, the driven chef who employs Lev as a dishwasher in his fashionable restaurant is another interesting character; I was prepared to hate him for what would surely be ruthless exploitation and mockery of Lev, but it was a pleasant surprise that this job would actually set Lev up for his future as a chef himself, even if this has a whiff of unbelievability about it, the enthusiasm and spirit of teamwork engendered in his restaurant was infectious, even to a sceptical reader!

The character of Christy, Lev’s Irish landlord, was well drawn, but I couldn’t help being a bit irritated that he had a drink problem. Why do Irish people always have to be portrayed as having drink problems? Lev certainly knocked back enough vodka during the course of the story, and Sophie did her share of drinking too, but it was the Irish guy who had the problem. Apart from that little bug-bear of mine, I thought his characterisation was spot-on, having the right mix of sadness and cynicism to pass for Irish. His accent was well written too, I could tell before he said it that Christy was from Dublin (even though he says “aye” once later on, which nobody in Ireland who isn’t from the province of Ulster would say. I know…nitpicking…). It was interesting that of two of the main male characters in the story were unsure of their own vices…Christy didn’t know if he had indeed ever hit his ex-wife as she claimed he did when he was drunk, and Lev was unsure whether he had raped Sophie. Both shed light on their relationships with their daughters; Christy desperately wanted to see his, while Lev seemed to idealise his without needing to see her much, even when he returned to his home.

Speaking of his home, I was surprised to find during our discussion that I had assumed that Lev was Polish, while Gill pointed out that Tremain makes no mention of where exactly he comes from. Kathy later posted on his blog that the city of Baryn is in Ukraine, but it seems Tremain wanted to keep it a bit vague perhaps as to where Lev is originally from. This was a novel that was rich in texture, and kept me and the other readers very interested all the way through. Even our criticism, such as they were, could not mar the fact that this is a novel worth reading.

Regarding next month’s book choice: Silas Marner by George Eliot; there was a bit of a mix up with the library’s booksets delivery; they haven’t got the books back yet from the last group who read it, and so we have decided this once to get our hands on the book by ourselves. It should be available to borrow from the library, and from charity shops perhaps, I got mine cheaply from Amazon, and one new reader has emailed me to say she found her old school copy on her bookshelf! If anyone has difficulty getting a copy let me know as the library may be able to send out a few copies from the readers group booksets later in the month.

Congrats to Julie by the way, on having a new baby, and also winning the Hereford Times bookclub book review competition this month!! Well done!!

On the 3rd of February a small band of readers braved the snowy weather and met at the Children’s Centre in Leominster, where we discussed The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. This tells the story of the consequences of a moment’s impulsive action, when Doctor David Henry, having delivered his wife of a twin boy and girl, sees the signs of Down’s Syndrome in the girl and gives her to a nurse to place in a care home, while telling his wife that she had in fact died. His wife, Norah brings up the boy, Paul in a haze of grief and puzzlement at his lack of grief, and their lives develop an emptiness at their core as the effects of the lie become deeper and deeper felt. The nurse, meanwhile, cannot bring herself to leave the baby girl, Phoebe, in an institution, and leaves Kentucky for Pittsburgh to reinvent herself as the mother of the child.

I read this novel last year, and must admit to having been carried along somewhat by the emotive content. As Julie said on her comment on the blog, it’s plot-heavy and emotional in an Oprah-ish way but gripping reading just the same.

Our discussion on Tuesday went along the same lines, quickly giving way to criticism of the book. We all agreed that while it’s an engaging read, it’s the sort of book you’re nearly embarrassed to have read; why that is I’m still not sure. I’ve just come across an interesting review in the Guardian, by Joanna Briscoe, which might throw some light on the subject; she calls it “a skilfully packaged debate-provoker that is perfectly attuned to the era of the book club,” citing novels by Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve as being cut from the same cloth. In fact Gill mentioned Jodi Picoult at the Babe in Arms discussion as being similar to Edwards, in that she disliked her style in the same way she dislikes Edwards’, and based on the single Picoult book I’ve read (My Sister’s Keeper), I’d agree that such books could have been designed with book groups in mind. So perhaps it’s this fact that grates a bit...are we being fed discussion fodder with this type of literature? Surely all novels should be discussable, not just those that tick certain boxes, such in this case issues concerning Practical Ethics. Maybe we feel just a tad patronised, and could do with a bit more showing and a bit less telling.

Those of us who discussed this book on Tuesday agreed that the discussion brought to the fore opinions we had that we hadn’t really analysed privately, which shows the value of group discussion. Gill felt that she didn’t feel any need to get to grips with the ethical issues raised in the story because for her none of the characterisations worked. Norah, for example changed from being an untouchable female ideal, a very old-fashioned concept of a lady with few responsibilities to being a shoulder-padded eighties executive type who had lots of affairs. Real life issues don’t really gain traction on this kind of environment. Kathy agreed with this and said that for her the characters were all too successful – David is an amateur photographer, but his photography is exhibited and acclaimed, and on top of this he is a successful medical practitioner. Norah runs a hugely successful travel agency and jet sets around the world. Caroline, the nurse who raises Phoebe, becomes a successful advocate for the rights of children with Down’s Syndrome.

While I agree with all of the above, I also couldn’t help being swayed by the discussion fodder, the actual crux of the novel; what happens when a child with Down’s is given away, and why it would be assumed that this would be the best thing to do in the first place. Edwards says of the book that many people have verified for her some of the more shocking aspects of the story, for example the casual assumption that crops up time and time again that Phoebe would be better off dead, and Caroline would prefer it that way also. In Can Any Mother Help Me? we read an account of the gradual diagnosis of a child with Down’s Syndrome, the almost brutal way that the mother was told, and the negative effect of her husband’s reaction. The child lived it seems from then on in an institution. This particular woman’s story was heartbreaking in that she seemed to be suffering from real mental anguish without knowing it, and surely the callous way most of the medical profession and goodness knows who else dealt with her child had something to do with it. It all seems like a long time ago, but disability, particularly mental disability is a thorny, stigma-ridden, guilt-ridden subject that very infrequently gets discussed.

I do agree, however, with the others, that the story continued well past its natural conclusion and dragged towards an ending replete with loose ends being tied up as well as pointless coincidences. Was there really a necessity to have any family reunion with or without David? And was it necessary for Norah and Paul to discover what was empty about their lives? It certainly cleared things up for all concerned, but it seemed a bit trite as Gill pointed out that within a week of their meeting Paul had overcome any difficulty he had with dealing with his sister; it seemed less and less grounded in reality to have an Oprah-like closure to every issue. From what I think was a promising premise; an uncomfortable facing-up to the way society can let down its most vulnerable members, the novel degenerated to a redemptive, mostly happily ended crowd-pleaser.

For next month we are reading The Road Home, by Rose Tremain, available as usual from Leominster Library.