Spotlight on the Reader with Kate Bateman - Workshop 4 (Enhancing Your Reading and Building a Better Book Club)

Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has given workshops at a variety of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.

Enhancing Your Reading and Building a Better Book Club

One of the best reasons to join a book-discussion group is that very likely you will encounter authors and read books outside your regular areas of interest. The counter is that the chosen book may not be of interest!

But then what is life without adventure? Or life without reading for pleasur?

What’s on offer in a Book Club?

(1) delight in the shared awareness of a book read for pleasure, later to be laced with intellectual discourse – sometimes with an added dash of hospitality;

(2) a contract – one usually fashioned from bonds of friendship, intelligence and good nature – good nature that may get tested! This implies that members’ commitment is as varied as there are books and should be allowed for when choosing titles and anticipating responses.

(3), a caveat: expression of an opinion may be coloured by circumstances prevailing during the private reading.  We read enmeshed within our own unique history, memories, and mind-set; in good or bad health, down in fortune or on the crest of the (clichéd) wave.  So, though members are reading the same book, everyone is reading a different book.

Selection 

It’s a good idea to select books well in advance (three months?) and to be mindful of the possible difference between “a good read for private reading” and “a good book for a discussion”, though they may often be the same book. Characteristics of books with appeal for group discussion include:

·  

• books on philosophy, music , mathematics, history or science, topics of serious interest to members
• well-written works that explore basic human truths.
• novels & memoirs that have three-dimensional characters
• shorter (200-300 pages) rather than longer novels
• some groups like to read of characters they can identify with – a matter of taste
• books with good characterisation - characters who, as they develop, are forced to make difficult choices, often under difficult conditions and whose behaviour sometimes makes sense and sometimes doesn’t.
• Good discussion books sometimes present the author’s view of an important truth and sometimes send a message to the reader – this is a matter of taste, also.

Books that are heavily plot-driven (mysteries, westerns, romances, and science fiction/ fantasy) usually don’t lend themselves to book discussions. In genre novels and some mainstream fiction (and often in nonfiction), the author spells out everything for the reader, so that there is little to say except, “I loved the book” or “I hated it” or “Isn’t that interesting.”
Other good choices for discussions are books that have ambiguous endings, where the outcome of the novel is not clear. There are also pairs of books that make good discussions. Some examples include Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys; E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Brideshead Revisited and Austen’s Mansfield Park – are both estate novels; one 19^th,  the other 20^th century – good for comparison.

Suggestions when reading for discussion

• Think about the cover, the title and the blurb as contributing towards the shape of the work.
• Make notes/use tabs on pages as you go and ask questions of yourself, possibly mark down pages you might want to refer back to. This slows you down but it but saves time later searching out important passages.
• Look out for issues and paragraphs that may lead to in-depth conversations.
• Be aware of the themes of the book.
• Consider whether there was a premise the author started with.
• Are the tone and style of the characters’ dialogues authentic?
• Notice how the author structured the book. Are chapters prefaced by quotes? If so, how do they apply to the content of the chapters? How is time organised? Are there grand sweeps of narrative devoted to issues, characters or epochs?
• How many narrators tell the story? Who are they? – close attention to narrative voice will usually deepen understanding and reveal ironies.
• How does the sequence of events unfold to create the mood of the story? Is it written in flashbacks?
• Make comparisons with other books and authors – themes, topics and authors’ earlier works.
• Knowledge of the author’s life and times is not necessary but it will enhance discussion as the book’s internal drama will be seen as having another layer of meaning.   

Suggestions for Participating and Leading The Discussion  

• Because discovery is everybody’s experience of a new book it can be difficult to propel discussion so as to get to the meat of the matter within the available timeframe. If one person is delegated to lead it helps. Here are some suggestions:
• Read book reviews (online or in newspapers) A Dictionary of Literary Biography gives biographical and critical material. Come prepared with 10 to 12 open-ended questions. Questions that can be answered yes or no cut off discussion quickly.
• Alternatively, ask each member of the group to come with one or more discussion questions. Readers will focus on different aspects of the book, and everyone will gain new insights as a result.
• Questions should be used to guide the discussion and keep it on track, but let the discussion flow naturally. Often the prepared questions will come up naturally as part of the discussion.
• Remind participants that “right” answers are not sought – but right questions are a boon. 
• Don’t be afraid to criticize a book, but get beyond the “I just didn’t like it” statement. What was it about the book that made it unappealing? The style? The pacing? The characters? Has the author written other books that you liked better? Did it remind you of another book that you liked or disliked? Some of the best book-discussions are on books members disliked.
• If words never expressed anything more than their speaker's direct intentions, not only would psychoanalysis never provide insight into unconscious motivations and desires, but also irony and ambiguity would be non-existent. So, be alert; - words bear more than their surface weight.
• Don't ignore intertextuality -- allusions to or echoes of other books. Saying that Ian McEwan's Atonement reminds you of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is perfectly legitimate, especially when you can point to specific passages or plot points that set up such echoes. The overuse of personal anecdotes ("Chapter Three reminds me of that time when I ...") is to be avoided – unless they amuse, of course.

Top book club choices from participants in one of Kate Bateman's workshops                

Author	Book  Title
Agassi Andre	Open : An Autobiography
Ali Hirsi Ayaan	Infidel
Aslam Nadeem	The Blind Man’s Garden
Barbery Muriel	The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Bogarde Dirk	The Complete Autobiography
Chang Jung	Wild Swans
De Beauvoir Simone	Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
De Waal Edmund	The Hare with Amber Eyes     x  2
Ford Jamie	Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Golden Arthur	Memoirs of a Geisha
Hamid Moshin	The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Hamilton Hugo	The Speckled People
Horan Nancy	Loving Frank
Hosseini Khaled	The Kite Runner
Kerrigan Gene	Another Country : Growing up in 50’s Ireland
Knatchbull Timothy	From A Clear Blue Sky
McCourt Frank	Angela’s Ashes
McGahern John	Memoir
Moorhead Caroline	Dancing to the Precipice : A life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin
Némirovsky Iréne	Suite Francaise               x  2
O’Brien Edna	Country Girl
O’Faoláin Nuala	Am I Somebody?          x   2
O’Faoláin Nuala	Best Love, Rosie
O’Rourke Mary	Just Mary
Paton Alan	Cry, the Beloved Country
Raverat Gwen	Period Piece
Seierstad Asne	The Bookseller of Kabul

Web Resources

Dlr Libraries

http://www.dlrcoco.ie/library/bookclubs_events.html and http://www.dlrcoco.ie/library/bookclub.htm

Irish book clubs in libraries and elsewhere - overview

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/libraries/books-and-reading/book-clubs/ and

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/libraries/books-and-reading/book-clubs/other-book-clubs/

Irish book club guides – booksellers (often have discounts for clubs)

http://www.dubraybooks.ie/bookclubs.asp

http://www.ravenbooks.ie/bookclubs.html

https://www.facebook.com/EasonBookClub

International

http://www.litlovers.com/

http://www.book-clubs-resource.com/

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/

Spotlight on the Reader with Kate Bateman - Workshop 3 (Openings of Novels & 'Time Present and Time Past' by Deirdre Madden)

Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has given workshops at a variety of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.

Workshop 3  

·         Openings of Novels – Notes

·         Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden: Faber & Faber, 224pp, £12.99

  

The critic, Terry Eagleton, says novels, seem to “spring out of a kind of silence”; they inaugurate a “fictional world that did not exist before”.

Think about this . . . .

As, readers, though most likely we are unaware of it, we are culturally conditioned even before we open a work of fiction to have expectations  - expectations and an anticipation to be engaged. We have expectations at a deeper level too – that the work honours what it says on: the blurb, the reviews, the word-of-mouth or what we know of treatment of the topic.

Writers, on the other hand seek to create a method of entry to a book’s substance. Whether writers and publishers cooperate is only known to the individuals themselves,  - as they thrash out such matters possibly over at least  one “literary lunch! Publishers are selling an artefact, which for them eye-appeal is the most important. But there are other items contributing to a book’s appeal on the self. The kind of soft/hard cover, for instance. Remember the Hare With Amber Eyes – an elegantly shaped book with a heavy board cover, no picture, printed on paper with the type setting at deep margins. As well as the usual frontispiece with the copyright & publishing information, there is a table of contents, a diagram, with the crest top right of the Ehphrussi Family Tree. Then the work itself begins with an eighteen-page Preface, followed by the first page of the novel with its title -  PART ONE – PARIS 1871-1899 and a map of Paris (Google, I think, not 18^th Century). Each page has the chapter title and page number in point 3 font at the bottom of the page.

Question: What are our expectations and why do you think the presentation style was chosen? 

We begin reading and grasp meanings because we come from a cultural framework of knowing we are at the beginning; just as we enter a theatre with a sense of crossing over, we have preparedness about how things open and have some knowledge of what a literary work is – we know the scene has to be set.

We, readers enter a contract to engage with the text but also knowing we can break it by not finishing the work.

Sometimes we are decoyed with a false start or a start that seems to have scant or unrevealed relevance to the body of the work until the book has been read. It is I’d argue a good idea to read the work with an awareness of any trim – lines of poetry/prose, a preface, an introduction

It’s as though, Eagleton says, the author clears his throat . . . . .

The power of the opening is to create a world, sometimes to amuse or frighten, certainly to persuade the reader to let go and commence the journey.

If we are going to talk about a work of fiction we should aim to going beyond the words on the page.

Perhaps look at the sentence formation, listen for the sounds of words and phrasing. An awareness of the emotional attitudes in a passage is worth thinking about when talking about a novel. Also, a focus on defining the kind of writing – whether lofty, or casual; glib, clever or witty; sombre, serious, sardonic or comic or some other mood or attitude that may be detected, is worthwhile.

  
(Kate looked at the opening chapters of three novels by Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival authors

• Eloise by Judy Finnegan
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
•  The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy

Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden: Faber & Faber, 224pp, £12.99

The three lines of poetry centrally placed on the novel’s pre-opening page and the words of the title are from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton.  These are helpful to the reader later when, the apparently practical-minded, Fintan Buckley becomes distant and vague; even visionary over the cardboard sleeve of the carrot cake (p.9). He surmises that it was his second such moment that day and, as we read on, the epiphany or reverie melds with a close scrutiny of a photograph of old Dublin. What Madden does so well in this book is to show us the outward appearance and knowledge family members have of each other and to combine it with the interior working pulse of the historic imagination. The Now and the Then; Time present and Time past are conflated in the mind of Fintan Buckley as he travels through the book. .

The language and structure of  the novel, however is very grounded.  The time is 2006, before the tiger lost his head and tail. The locations are as vivid as anything in Joyce’s Dubliners. Like Stephen Deadalus, the characters walk on named streets and into named buildings – hospitals and restaurants.  Baggot and Grafton streets are cited, the village of Howth is where the Buckleys live and a journey to Armagh is undertaken to reconnect with a cousin not seen since ending the Troubles. They meet, have meal and resolve not to let too much time pass before their next meeting.

The story links the narratives of several members of the Buckley family over a few days; they are living in Dublin just before the economic crash. They are an ordinary family, which of course means that they are unique. Fintan, the father, at 47 is a solicitor, happily married with three children, is on the surface a completely conventional member of society. 

Fintan’s teenage son points out that his father’s own youth is now “the past”, for the young in Ireland now, it takes an effort to imagine living during the Troubles while the bank crash which will affect Fintan’s sons lives will also pass into history – a history that was once a “now” for us readers.

Houses get attention. Fintan’s sister Martina, lives with their aunt Beth in a curious old house heavy with the aura and furnishings of previous generations.  She is also thinking about the past and about the circumstances in which her life seemed to derail. For her, it’s a process of separating out what is truly past, how it has formed her, and what she is now, there is a sense that places and objects have an almost tangible energy beyond their substance. Eventually Fintan and Martina revisit the location of a photograph and their different responses feel perfectly true to each of them.

The book lightly invites us to explore our own memories as they rampage through the imagination and it also touches on the way modern Ireland rests uneasily on its history.

Spotlight on the Reader with Kate Bateman - Workshop 2 (Memoirs and the novel)

Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has given workshops at a variety of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.

 Workshop 2 - Memoirs and the novel - Notes

You may wonder why Selina Guinness’s, The Crocodile by the Door and Julia O’Faolain’s Trespassers were chosen? I know Julia O’Faolain had to cancel, but because I thought I should include memoir-writing in a workshop I decided to use the contrast the works provided. Memoirs use the same literary devises as fiction, as do biographies but without the research apparatus of footnotes, indices and bibliography. Memoirs are a kind of fiction – both select material about characters (real and imagined).

It is well-known in the trade that “True Stories” sell best, and that “life writing” has exercised English departments and review sections of the broadsheets for some time. It’s a portmanteau genre which includes confessions, letters, journals, diaries, oral narratives, even court records... Novels like The Gamal and the The Fields are memoir-novels which arguably were born out of the MODERNIST idea of breaking down conventions ... Think of what James Joyce did to the novel form with his day-in-the-life-a-Dublin-Jew novel.

But where does this leave us when we read Julia O’Faolain’s Trespassers classified by herself as “A Memoir” ? And, Selina Guinness’s Crocodile by the Door as, “A Story of a House a Farm, and a Family”? Does it matter whether a MEMOIR is verifiably truthful? ... Probably, yes ... John Mc Gahern’s Memoir, his story of growing up in County Leitrim, reads as the truth of what happened when his mother died and his father, a very vain, cruel, wayward man, controlled the family ...We believe it to be truthful because, I suggest, Mc Gahern’s fiction and the writing style of the memoir is all of a piece ... Another work with the ring of authenticity, is Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark ... a tragic-comic story of growing up in Derry ... fastened down with actual dates but written within as a mystery, who-dun-it. It even has the young Deane with a sibling on the cover ... Yet he and the publisher insist it is a fiction. Henry James called the nineteenth-century novel “a baggy monster” but the memoir/autobiography is at least as baggy and it has a longer history. When Augustine of Hippo wrote the Confessions there was already long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men, among them —Plutarch’s Lives, written at the end of the first century A.D. Several epochs later, Rousseau’s Confessions were more about escapades and wrong-doing (the stealing of a ribbon and foisting the blame on another) than focusing on God. Later we get the slave narrative, the

Holocaust survivors’ stories and the “I slept with  . . .” memoirs. In 2009 a cause celebre occurred in the US when Oprah Winfrey and her staff of well-paid reader-advisors, were, it is argued, badly and publicly duped. James Frey’s literary sensation, A Million Little Pieces, rocketed to No 1 on the New York Times best seller list after HER book-club hyped its message of redemption for drug addicts. His publisher described it as a “memoir” ... “fiercely honest and deeply affecting ... one of the most graphic and immediate books ever written about addiction and recovery” Frey’s defence on the Larry King Show was that he merely “embellished” the incidents. “It’s a memoir”, he added ... “It’s an imperfect animal ... I don’t think it should be held up and scrutinised the way a perfect non-fiction documentary would be ... or a newspaper article.”

On the other side of the argument, Kathryn Hughes of the Observer referred to the memoir as ... “Pieces of prose that once would have been sent out into the world as novels, have more recently been packaged as the Story of Me”. She cites Lorna Sage’s bestseller, Bad Blood, to my mind, terrific work, about growing up in an impoverished parsonage in Wales, as model.

And among the questions we might ask are:

§         What is the purpose of the ‘true life’/memoir – to explain, justify, entertain??

§         Does the work have direct appeal to some audiences more than another? appeal for certain a

§         As a story, is it more powerful than a fiction?

§         What choices have the authors made when shaping the life-story ...

§         How is the passage of time presented?

§         Does your perception of the writer affect your experience of the book ... (Mc Gahern’s Memoir is useful here)?

§         What is Are there benefits and drawbacks ... when an author shares an intimate view of their life?

Both Guinness and O’Faolain memoirs certainly have appeal for readers who know or knew something of the writers and their families. But because they are both heirs to hefty social, political and intellectual inheritances their memoirs have not just interest, but perhaps significance? Selina Guinness is clear that her family tree is a distant branch only of the famous brand; nonetheless her story is a twenty-first century version of the ‘ Irish big house’ and its struggles. Julia O’Faolain’s story is fashioned out of Ireland’s intellectual sector as it struggled against the narrow-minded, repressive religious and political authorities of post War of Independence Ireland. Both writers have a tale to tell that explains, justifies a little and engages readers.  

O’Faolain’s chapter headings, all but three, contain place names: Protestant Killiney, My First Summer in France, Paris and the Council of Europe & Portland Oregon. But this is a thoughtful, memory-driven book, not a travelogue; there is a strong sense when reading it of being within the writer’s mind-set. Note the title – Trespassers  

The Crocodile by the Door

Belinda Mc Keon in a truncated (by me) review says:

Guinness spent her teenage years here (Tibradden) in the care of her uncle and grandmother. In 2004, this time joined by her husband, she is once again living with her uncle when he becomes ill and dies. Not before he . . . shut off all disordered rooms, also shut out disordered situations; Guinness now faces the consequences of his well-meaning denial, especially when it comes to the farm's elderly stewards, Joe and Susie Kirwan, who inhabit its gate lodge with their disabled son.
The Crocodile by the Door . . . is a surprisingly entertaining primer on the travails of farming today, from ungovernable sheep to unfathomable bureaucracy; a fascinating glimpse of what had become of the Anglo-Irish by the late 20th century and into the 21st; an elegant modern pastoral and, at the same time, an astute dismantling of that genre; and a meditation on the meaning of labour, and on how hard work shapes identity as well as achievement.
The changes Guinness must now make are necessary not just for the survival of the farm, but for the protection of the Kirwans, who have long lived in a kind of furtive squalor. Guinness is discomfited to find that she cannot address this situation without looking, to the Kirwans and to others in the locality, like a harsh landlord of the ascendancy class to which she, however distantly, belongs – class divisions cannot be chatted away.
Early on in the book, a flashback to a girlhood moment by the fire cannot but evoke Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, and there is something of Lois Farquar even about the adult Guinness: the niece of the house, caught between worlds, learning that politics are always personal. There is no way, however, around the irony of Guinness, from within an old Anglo-Irish estate, looking with distaste on the colonisation of a country by the builders and developers who consider themselves its new ascendancy. She does not deny this irony – but nor does she force it. Out of the complexities of attachment, and out of a knowledge, hard-won, of what true dereliction is, Guinness has written a remarkable book.