Of Books and Book Clubs

I have been a member of a Book Club in Lismore for the past nine years, and it has opened a window to a world of books and authors that I might otherwise never have read. I have always loved reading and was a prolific reader growing up as an only child - Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven, as well as her school series, Richmal Crompton's "William" books, the "Jennings" school series, Billy Bunter, "What Katy did" series, Charles Dickens, Little Women, and many more. I was pretty eclectic and read comics and annuals which I still have and the kids have enjoyed - Beano and Dandy with their beloved Dennis the Menace and his trusty pets Gnasher and Rasher, and Desperate Dan with his cow pie, and the more girly comics like Bunty, Judy, and June and School Friend. We then moved on to teen mags like Fab 208, which celebrated the long-defunct Radio Luxembourg, which introduced my generation to pop culture as much as BBC Radio One did some years later. Ireland had a long way to go to catch up on the rest of the world, with the clergy decrying the evils of rock'n'roll and groups like the Beatles from the pulpit at every opportunity.

Then I went through the chick-lit years of Patricia Scanlon and Maeve Binchy, and read all of James Michener during the 70s and 80s, and living in Africa and Asia led to books with those settings, like Kipling and M.M. Kaye's Indian books, and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. The African books included everything from Wilbur Smith's historic novels to Thomas Pakenham's Scramble for Africa, which I already wrote about here, to accounts of the Rwandan genocide which was very close to our lives. In case this all sounds dreadfully worthy and dull, I read all of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole books, and still love Ross O'Carroll-Kelly's running autobiography penned by his alter ego Paul Howard. They are a peculiarly Irish phenomenon and many of you may not know them - but they are hilarious! They incorporate a whole new world of Irish rhyming slang which probably take some lateral thinking to fully comprehend (e.g. " Roy" = eager - as in Roy (sometime Irish soccer player) Keane = keen. I know, it takes some local knowledge but this site helps!). Given that Ross was invented as a send-up of the worst types that unearned entitlement threw up in the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, and was adopted as a hero by the very people he was spoofing, with a total lack of irony, says a lot for the shallowness of same tiger cubs! I am just finishing off the newest book - We need to talk about Ross - and enjoying it as a light summer laugh.

I wanted to name some of the book club reads we had lately, as we have a list up to 2005 and thereafter it's guesswork. We each select a book for discussion and the only criteria is that the selector must have read the book, and it is in print and in paperback.

About our Book Club

We are not affiliated to the library book clubs that have sprung up around Ireland but are a group of women from diverse backgrounds who like reading and got together to start the book club ten years ago. Men aren't banned (we're not sexist like some golf clubs!) but it was decided at the outset that partners and husbands wouldn't join, just to avoid any inhibitions I suppose - books could be a flashpoint if there were wildly varying opinion and we didn't want anyone holding back. It can get quite heated at times, and we all love a lively debate.

We meet on neutral ground which is currently a room above a local pub. This is in contrast to a lot of book clubs which meet in the members' houses on a rotating basis. I have to confess a preference for our method for a variety of reasons, as follows:

Advantages of meeting on neutral ground

• It gets us out of the house on a weeknight - we meet up on a Monday each month in a room above a local pub.



• It removes the status anxiety inherent in having the book club at home, perhaps tidying up, dispatching kids and partners from the room and generally ensuring a child and man-free zone - not an easy task in today's open-plan homes.


• It prevents grandstanding in the cookery/baking/snacks stake.



• We can have a nice cuppa tea or coffee or a glass of wine or whatever we like, depending on mode of transport home - for me, that's walking.



• We don't have to get all glammed up as it's not like we're going clubbing or to the theatre, so smart casual is as fashionable as it gets.



• There is no danger of anyone eavesdropping if scintillating gossip is being shared.



• We enjoy the camaraderie of shared interests and female friendship.
  
  
• All of us have such busy lives it is crucial to have an interest that extends into totally new territory.
  
  
• We get to borrow books from each other and read new writers - I found Sue Miller , Barbara Kingsolver and Barbara Trapido here, and am very grateful!



• We have a good excuse to have a big night out occasionally - usually a good meal out in January to combat the post-Christmas blues.
  

Disadvantages

• We don't get to snoop at other members' houses.
  
  
• We don't have a nice meal/cakes/snacks every month in home comfort.

I can't think of any other drawbacks - if you can, all comments welcome!

I have reviewed a number of books on Living Social and Library Thing which I will try to link. Library Thing is a sidebar widget on this blog so look it up and add it to your blog as it is a great resource. I review books not as an ego trip to show how clever I am but because I forget so quickly what I have read and it is a way to recall the delights of an enjoyable book with my appalling retention - I have difficulty remembering the last book I read so it focuses the mind to review them and if it is read by other readers that's a bonus, not the intention.

I had the pleasure albeit embarrassing at the time of having a book review read by the author who turned up as a speaker at Immrama in 2008. We had read Blood River by Tim Butcher and had a great discussion on it, as we had all pretty much unanimously decided that Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible was a group favourite and this was also set in the Congo, over 40 years later. Tim read my review on Facebooks Living Social application, and was very gracious about it, lucky it was a positive one!

The recent books in no particular order include the following list:

• Stasiland - Anna Funder



• The March - E.L. Doctorow



• The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford (my selection - love the Frank Bascombe trilogy)



• Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami



• The Secret Scripture - Sebastian Barry (Brilliant Irish novel, very fact-based events)



• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf



• The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion



• Dreams of my Father - Barack Obama



• Stealing Water - Tim Ecott

Of these, I did not enjoy The March as American Civil War books just don't appeal to me. Nor did the Murakami book which was the first of his I'd read, just too anarchic and soulless, and while it seems churlish to speak ill of the dead, I found the Joan Didion book way too hard to even read as she had to deal with way too much grief for anyone to bear at one go - husband keeling over after dinner and adult daughter on life support following catastrophic brain damage. Her book was probably cathartic and made a wonderful stage show by all accounts but it was hard going for this reader.

I loved the others. Stasiland was a brilliant insight to the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in the former East Germany and inspired me to see the film The Lives of Others (Das leben der Anderen) about the paranoia and the impact of the state on ordinary people which must still resonate today.

Sebastian Barry's book was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and as we say in Ireland - he was robbed - but then he won the Costa prize and that was a vindication of a brilliant book. It was criticised for a twist at the end but I felt it didn't detract from the book even if it was a bit too contrived. Many Irish people were locked away from society in asylums, if they were seen as a threat by being different or anti-establishment. We have a long history in that whole area - I wrote about the Ryan report on Institutional Child Abuse here and this was another sorry saga in our dysfunctional collective psyche.

Richard Ford has written three great American novels in the Frank Bascombe Trilogy and I have reviewed all of them on Living Social here. He is up there with the great contemporary writers like John Updike in his Rabbit books and Philip Roth with the Zuckerman books.

We have a long Russian read over the summer recess - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I have yet to get it and while it is online at Gutenberg project website I don't think I'd have the stamina to read such a weighty tome on my laptop! We have yet to embrace the Electronic book readers like Sony and Kindle in Ireland - in fact I don't think Kindle works here even if you got it on Amazon.

Perhaps that will be the next big thing and the prophets of doom will be predicting the end of the written word as we know it, but if the internet hasn't destroyed the book industry I doubt if it'll fall prey to the e-book readers. There will always be the pleasure of the physical sense of a book, and like newspapers online, there is no way that I read the Irish Times in the same detail online as I do the print edition. I have stopped buying the daily paper though, as I realised I was often only reading the preferred features and skimming the news anyway, and now I do that online but still buy the Saturday edition for the magazine and the Weekend review supplement.

One of the joys of the Immrama Travel Writing Festival is the opportunity to buy a lot of books of the presenters and get them signed, items to treasure long after they are read.

This is long enough for a literary reflection - if you have any recommendations let me know - there are plenty of avid bookworms out there and I would love to have some more book-posts in my blog but there's no point in blogging on books if it eats into reading time.

Devonshire Day in Lismore Castle

Yesterday we had a lovely day in Lismore Castle. It was a fundraiser for the annual Immrama Festival of Travel Writing which will be held in June and this was the 6th Devonshire Day, as this day is called. It is so called as the Castle is the Irish seat of the Dukeof Devonshire, and the idea has evolved into an annual day out on the Sunday nearest to St. Patrick's Day, which falls tomorrow.

The Avenue from the riding house looking towards the main gate and courtyard



The Castle is not normally open to the public, as the son of the present Duke, Lord Burlington, and his wife, spends quite a lot of time in Lismore, and as the castle is an upmarket guest house for well-heeled guests (those who can spare about €35,000 for a week's full-board with the butlers on hand for a party of 12!) it is also not practical to have tourists tramping about the rooms. So this day is an opportunity to see a little of the interior and people travel from far and wide to enjoy the day.

Enjoying the tea during the talk

The visitors have Devonshire Cream Tea in the Ballroom, which was formerly a chapel and is known as the "Pugin Room" as it was designed by Augustus Pugin, an architect and designer who also designed the Houses of Parliament in Westminister. A number of church and big house interiors have his signature wood panelling and furnishings. It is now used as a room for events like concerts, wedding receptions occasionally, and banqueting hall for large parties of houseguests. It has a marble fireplace which was originally built by Pugin for the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851 and brought here after that was dissembled, with the addition of "Céad Mille (sic) Fáilte" written across the top (this means 100,000 welcomes in Irish.)

Various views of the castle from the courtyard

When Prince Charles and his then fiancée Camilla came to Lismore a few years back for the 60th birthday bash of his pal the current duke who was then Lord Hartington. (The old Duke died some years later and Lord Hartington inherited the title. I suppose that means that Lord Burlington, his son, is technically the new Marquis of Hartington, but he is still using the same title.) Charles and Camilla really chilled out on their visit and did a handshaking walkabout after Sunday service in the Cathedral, with minimal security on hand. He is seen as either a harmless tree-hugger or vilified for his marital infidelity to Diana, but he was accepted in Lismore as another visitor to the castle, without much fuss being made of either of them.

The Duke's main home is Chatsworth in Derbyshire, which is one of the great houses of England and a major tourist attraction, much more open to the public than Lismore Castle. Bolton Abbey is another of their houses, and I have never been to either place, but my son played cricket with the Lismore Cricket Team when they went to Bolton Abbey play the Duke's 11 some years ago, and had a chance to see both houses. Our sons have had summer jobs there as butlers over their student years as well, and were working there for the royal visit. They are extremely discreet so I never get any gossip from them, no matter how much I fish!

Enough potted history for now. Yesterday's event was practically fully booked, as the format was five groups of 60 max came at 80 minute intervals. They arrived via the Castle Avenue to the Courtyard and went to the Ballroom, where they had their tea, surrounded by the splendour of the stained glass windows and the Pugin-designed chandelier and wall lights.

During the tea there were talks on the history of the Castle and Lismore, the "Big houses" along the River Blackwater, and the Castle Gardens from various local historians and the Head Gardener. These informative talks put a context on the day, and after tea they got a guided tour of the spring gardens from the wife of the Head Gardener, as he was out of action from a (work-related) foot injury.

So that was the pattern of the day. I am involved in the festival from the health and safety angle and attend all the events as a First Aid person. This entailed accompanying each group around the gardens, tastefully clad in a yellow Hi-Viz jacket and armed with a medical kit! Luckily my skills weren't called on yesterday and I had a chance to take lots of photos and learn about the wonderful plants, shrubs and trees, and the garden's architecture, which has the remnants of a 19th century Joseph Paxton greenhouse. Paxton designed the above mentioned Crystal Palace in London for the Exhibition in 1851 and he was the head gardener of Chatsworth but was also responsible for how Lismore Castle looks today, as he re-designed it to its current look. There are a number if sculptures in the gardens, which are nice to come upon as you go around. There is a typical Anthony Gormley bronze body cast - his own as is his signature - and that is in the middle of an ancient yew walk in the photo.

His most famous work is The Angel of the North in Newcastle-on-Tyne in England, visible for miles around. The magnolias are magnificent right now and you can see their splendour in the photo, a highlight of the spring garden, along with rhododendrons and azaleas.

I hope you like the photos and links and if you get a chance to come to Lismore you can visit the gardens from tomorrow until October when they will be open daily, minus the guided tour - you can get a brochure with identifiers for the trees and shrubs and history - and the Castle Arts Gallery which is in the renovated West Wing and has a different contemporary exhibition every summer. If you like weird and wonderful art - in a multitude of media from sculpture to video installations to technology installations - in a lovely setting then this one's for you!

Sotheby's have had a preview of their Irish Art sales here for the past few years as well, which gives a nice opportunity to see some amazing artworks. The annual exhibitions are not all to my taste, but then I am a traditionalist at heart and love a good Old Master. There was a show two years ago when they juxtaposed the old and the new, with a private Florida-owned collection of very contemporary stuff out in old stables and coalsheds that led to a lot of bewildered head-scratching, and in the Gallery there were lovely works by Van Eyck, Gainsborough, and other famous painters. Each owner selected the works of the other for the exhibition, an odd fusion to say the least!

Yesterday's visitors were very enthusiastic about the whole experience and then they went to the Heritage Centre as part of the day's package. The sun shone and there was spring warmth in the air, and Farmer's Market was in full swing in the Castle Avenue,

so the town was buzzing.

Immrama will have its launch in the Gallery in a month or two, so watch this space!

(If you want to see more photos I have uploaded them to a Picasa slideshow on the sidebar of this blogpost, right at the top right at present. Click on these photos to see them full-screen size, if you want the detail.)

The Stained Glass window overlooking the Ballroom with the Pugin Chandelier in the foreground

The Stained Glass window over the Minstrel's Gallery, with St. Patrick on the Right and (I think) St. George on the Left

Some of the sculpture in the Lower Garden

The yew walk with the Gormley figure visible on the right half-way down

The Pugin marble fireplace

The misspelt Irish greeting

The castle from the Lower Gardens

The Magnolias in full bloom in the Lower Garden with the Riding House in the background. This straddles the Avenue and links the upper and lower gardens