Upton upon Severn Readers Group

June 2010

The first book was "The Tenderness of Wolves" by Steff Penny written when The Hudson Bay Company was newly formed and proved to be the way Canada was opened up. There's a great deal of competition from the French trappers as it's all about the very profitable fur trade. What with one and another, its a wonder that any fur-bearing animals were left. It makes really interesting reading about the hunt for the murderer of one who manipulated both sides for gain. The searchers were helped by the native Indians, now known as the First Nation, who thoroughly understood how to survive in the wild. We all enjoyed it (some more than others) with the two cultures co-operating and learning from each other. As those employed by the Hudson Bay Company and also the Scottish emigrants arrived, they needed each other.

The next book "Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafron, a translation. Everyone liked it but it got a bit tangled up with too may characters. It's a book about books and the effect they had on other people's lives. It's based on a huge labyrinth where every book ever published is saved - though whether this is possible is a very vexed question.
Dorothy Frayne

May 2010
The first of our April books was "Useless" by Carol Shields, a Canadian author - quite a change from rather a lot American writers. It was about a middle-class, professional family of Scottish descent, with three daughters. After never being any trouble, the eldest daughter quite suddenly leaves university, starts begging in the street in the name of "Goodness". Her family are quite bewildered and anxious about this strange behaviour without any explanation but continue to love and support her. Some of us found it boring whilst the rest of us thought it interesting as another symptom of adolescence.

The next book was "Iris and Ruby" by Rosie Thomas. It was set in Cairo during World War II and Cairo as it is now. Iris, the grandmother and Ruby, her granddaughter shared the same temperament though Iris seemed vastly more grown-up at roughly the same age as Ruby who came out as childish and thoughtless. Neither of them really liked their families and Iris wanted more than anything to live her own life professionally. It was difficult to know what Ruby wanted. The book got a mixed reception - not a man's book: - some abandoning it and others finding it quite interesting as a period piece when life in the wartime 1940's was very different to today.
Dorothy Frayne

April 2010
The first book in February was "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" by Paul Torday. Some readers found it rather tedious while the rest of us - even those anti-fishing or with no interest in it - quite enjoyed it. The main characters, especially the Sheik, were memorable. It was, on the face of it, a completely ridiculous idea to take salmon fishing to the Yemen (to encourage tourists!) and whilst it didn't quite happen, it might have done. Mostly enjoyed as an original idea.

The next book "The Lambs of London" by Peter Ackroyd was very different, set in a London that no longer exists. Our two men enjoyed it but the women did rather criticise it to the point of disbelief that such people really existed, people who believed that one of Shakespeare's plays had been found. The mix and the imagined didn't somehow join-up seamlessly so that the story was difficult to follow easily. Did, we ask, Mary Lamb really murder her mother with a fork? Did her father's senile dementia really bother society? We are woefully ignorant of both.
Dorothy Frayne

March 2010
Due to snow, ice, illness and various other impediments, we've only just - in February - got back to normal. We read The Oxford Murders' by Guilenmo Martinez in January and most of us found it rather dry, more of a puzzle, without much real human interest. Perhaps we were rather in the rarified atmosphere of academia. We all read it without it making much of an impression on us. Maybe it also lost something in translation.

The next one in February 'Spies' by Michael Frayne, was full of human interest and more interesting to those amongst us who'd lived through World War 2 as teenagers or small children when all the social conventions were still unchanged from the thirties. For small children there was a lot of scope for their imaginations although they only knew what they were told or weren't allowed to know, resulting in disastrous consequences on the lives of their families and neighbours. We all liked it in varying degrees as it gave a true account of what it was like for small children in wartime.
Dorothy Frayne

November 2009
The first of our October books was 'My Sister's Keeper' by Jodi Picoult. This presented a quite modern dilemma of parents quite deliberately deciding to have another specially-selected child to provide what their eldest daughter needed to combat a virulent strain of leukaemia. The problem is that both daughters feel very strongly about it as they grow older and question their parents' authority. We had a most interesting discussion, with most of us defending the donor child's rights to a normal life whilst at the same time recognising that both parents, especially the mother, were prepared to sacrifice one child for another.

The second book 'The Farm' by Richard Benson was about real farmers in a changing world who were trying to find other ways of making a living. It's written by one of the sons who finds himself hopeless at modern farming but academically bright so he sees his own family's problems while still in a way involved with them. We were quite divided on this, the older generation remembering the rationing of food both during World War 2 and almost another ten years after. Younger people were either very small or not yet born and failed to recognise that the fear of hunger is very real indeed. The book ends on a rather pessimistic note as the son who leaves home sees our food-producing industries decline and we depend more and more on poorer agricultural countries.
Dorothy Frayne

July 2009
Our meeting on 22nd June was held to discuss The Thirteenth Tale' by Dianne Setterfield. It had come as a blessed relief after twq direjy grim, depressingly unpleasant novels; so we were mostly in the mood for a well-written, pleasant novel with an intertwined puzzle. Set in no particular time, it would have fitted in almost any era with a timeless sense of times gone-by when time itself didn't really matter as much as it does now.

The next meeting on 6th July was quite different as we had a selection of non-fiction books to read and discuss. It led to a very lively discussion about the ability of human beings to face and overcome disasters of one kind or another. Even livelier was the discussion pf the power of faith in different countries, and how it is used and mis-used to control people.
Dorothy Frayne

June 2009
The book for 27th May, 'The Golden Notebook' by Doris Lessing, we were told, was very popular in the 1950's and even avant-garde. We found it very dated and that hardly anyone had read it because it was hard going. The theme was the relationships amongst the middle classes - the middle classes in the opinion of more than one reader being boring anyway, in any period!

The next one, 'How To Talk To A Widower' by Jonathan Tropper was just about the opposite of Doris Lessing and was soundly trounced in discussion; perhaps unjustly as only one reader had actually finished it. Two people gave it faint praise saying that stripped of the graphic sex scenes and turning a blind eye to the extremely course language, there was very possibly the basis of an interesting plot in it.

We will be having two meetings in July, the 6th & 20th after which we take a months break for the whole of August. Meetings start again on 7th September.
Dorothy Frayne

May 2009
The book we read for 20th April was 'Fire in the Blood' by Irene Neminousky. Owing to the Easter holiday, we had three weeks to read this slight book that had been written 60 years before. It's about the experience of upper class, once wealthy people who have fled to the safety of rural France. The farming community who live lives of hard work & poverty but who have a very high and rigid moral standard, regard their new neighbours much as they would aliens from another planet. The dispossessed newcomers and the immutable workers of the land watch each other but never mix. We found it difficult to say what we thought of this book from our 2009 viewpoint. We found the author's own life more interesting as she had been exiled, lived in France and died in a concentration camp.

The book for 11th May, 'The Memory Keepers Daughter' by Kim Edwards was completely different. This was America 1964 and over a period of years, with all the changes in lifestyle, attitudes had changed but the age-old problems of human beings stayed the same. The story was based on a lie (told without time for thought) that changed the lives of three adults and two children, twins. It ruined the marriage of two people and gave unexpected happiness and fulfilment to the third person, whilst splitting the twins to lead very different lives. The feeling amongst the readers was very varied - some found it enjoyable, some too wordy and some failed to finish it. However, we had a very lively discussion about Downs Syndrome babies, attitudes towards them in 1964 and rather different attitudes now.  Before, they were often sent to special homes and often died young.

Owing to losing Bank Holiday meetings, we will in future, be meeting on the following Wednesday for the week only. Please check in the library.
Dorothy Frayne