The Reader Online

A Get Into Reading project worker describes her experience of reading in a Care Home, Winter 2008.

Arriving at the care home where I run a reading group for people with dementia this week felt a bit like entering a scene from Apocalypse Now. The main lounge is being re-decorated. This may not sound like much of an event, but for the 30 residents who spend the best part of their days in that lounge, the disruption to routine and unfamiliar surroundings that they have been moved into are hugely distressing. I was met with cries of ‘I want to go home’ and ‘Have you come to take me home now?’ Feeling horribly inadequate, I admitted that I had come to read poems, wondering what possible comfort that could bring just then.

The session began as I suspected it would. Without the support of the activities co-ordinator who usually attends the group (and who has been away in Australia for the past four weeks) I began by reading ‘The Village Blacksmith’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The group was unsettled. Patients were wandering in and out, conscious of the chaos behind the door, which had spread into minds which could not settle. But a funny thing happened in the midst of the chaos. Several individuals in the group seemed to remove themselves from it all and manage to disappear off into the poems almost as a break away from it all. Taking hold of the poems in their hands, they resolutely focused on these and ignored the disruptions.

One lady was captivated by the story of The Village Blacksmith, saying ‘Oh, well he has so many children. He must look after them and work hard. They aren’t into it as much as him, even though they like watching’. She was picking up on the description of the children watching the man at work with the sparks flying, on their way home from school. When I asked people what sort of man they thought the blacksmith was, Ella went back to the line, ‘His brow is wet with honest sweat’ and simply read it out to us all. It is a great summary of the man presented in the poem. Irene seemed to recognise the poem, calling it ‘The Village Smithy’ . She told us that she had had a job where she worked hard like the man in the poem – as a nurse in Southport Hospital .‘I worked very hard then, lots of running around. I trained in Southport. All my sisters were nurses too. I enjoyed it most of the time’. May was still reading the poem over and said ‘It is about something very sad and serious I think, not entirely happy’.

Ella wanted to read the next poem, ‘Happiness’ by Raymond Carver. Interestingly she seemed to get caught up in the feeling and emotion of the poem, and at one point, instead of reading ‘I think if they could, they would take/each other’s arm. ‘It’s early in the morning…’ she inserted her own line between them, saying ‘I think if they could, they would take/ each other’s arm/ and they would sing! These boys/It’s early in the morning…’. She then carried on reading and I thought it was wonderful that she had picked up this joy which seems to transcend explanation in the poem, and described what that felt like to her, mixing her own words with the poem. It worked perfectly. Later she kept going back to this line in the poem about the boys taking each other’s arm.

Finally we read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. I asked Irene if she liked the poem. ‘Yes, I thought it was lovely. It wasn’t like the others, it was about peace.’ I asked her what she would want to take with her if she was going to go to a place like the one in the poem. ‘Well, I would take a book of poems to read. That would keep me happy. And, if I could manage it, I would take a record player and a tape of poems being read by their authors!’ It struck me that the desire in the poem to ‘arise and go now… And live alone in the bee-loud glade’ must feel very real here, and that briefly, for a few quiet moments amid the chaos, we had found something of that in these poems which allowed us to disappear into another world which ‘the deep heart’s core’ quietly longs for.

Although a few days early, here’s something to read as the New Year comes round. It was written on New Year’s Eve 1865 and encapsulates that tumultuous sense of ’change’ – be it perceived good or bad – that often pervades this period. Standing on a tower, the poet speaker is given a vantage point that allows him to look to both the year that is ending and the one that is beginning. Time flows, things pass and there will always be questions left unanswered. The imagery in this poem is fairly rough; the winds of change are not gentle here but “roaring and blowing”, as life itself can be. Brace yourselves for 2009…

I Stood on a Tower

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing;
And I said, ‘O years, that meet in tears,
Have you all that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?
Seas at my feet were flowing,
Waves on the shingle pouring,
Old year roaring and blowing,
And New Year blowing and roaring.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Posted by Jen Tomkins

Happy Christmas!

Ella Jolly, Reader-in-Residence, Bibby Line Group

Persuasion by Jane Austen.

Although I love Pride and Prejudice for Elizabeth Bennett’s dancing wit, Sense and Sensibility for Marianne Dashwood’s passionate romanticism, it is Persuasion’s Anne Elliot whom I most admire. As a girl she is convinced to throw away her own happiness; as a young woman, in spite of disappointment and loneliness and her awful family, she is dignified, courageous and perennially hopeful. I look forward to curling up beneath the boughs of our Christmas tree anticipating Captain Wentworth’s final love letter  and those lines ’You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me that I am not too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself with a heart even more your own than when you first broke it eight years ago… I have loved none but you…’ 

The books I’ll give….

Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance  by Barack Obama

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Mostly I feel hugely uninspired by politicians. However, this year, for the first time in my life, I felt as if the political victory of this one man could really change my life – and I’m not even American! I am yet to read Obama’s books, but I hear they are eloquent, passionate and highly intelligent. They’ll be wrapped and hidden under the tree for my father – and then I plan to hijack them. 

The book I am hoping for…

Selected Poems 1923 – 1958 by e.e. cummings

For me, 2008 has been the year of the poem. I have bought more poetry books than any other kind, studied 20^th century American poetry intensively and wondrously, and now am determined to bring the myriad pleasures of poetry to people in Bibby Line Group. Recently I’ve been enjoying lots of e.e. cummings. I love how his unconventional syntax and almost made-up language simultaneously make no sense and all the sense in the world. His poems ‘I thank you god for most this amazing day’ and ‘i carry your heart with me’ have affected members of my groups in Bibby more profoundly than I could have imagined. It’s the fresh and direct communication of feeling which does it I think – it’s impossible to read and be unmoved by his writing. And that’s my favourite kind of poetry.

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Katie Clark, Project Worker, Get Into Reading

The book I will be reading this Christmas

I will be re-reading  Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights which I enjoyed as a teenager and have wanted to return to for some time. I love the dark energy that surges through the book and always enjoy picturing Emily Bronte writing such passionate descriptions of Heathcliff in the parsonage in Haworth, struggling to put the two contrasting pictures together somehow. The description of Wuthering Heights and the cold, bleak moor alongside the strong, tempestuous characters are perfect for snuggling up on a cold Christmas evening in front of the fairy lights!

The book I will be giving this Christmas

I will be giving a copy of Penguin’s Poems for Life, a beautiful anthology of poems beautifully selected and inspired by a few lines in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, in which Jaques describes a human life as having seven distinct ages. This book is available in a lovely hardback edition, and Penguin have recently released a paperback version which is a great stocking filler! I think that everyone could find a poem they love among this wonderful collection.

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Jen Tomkins, Communications Officer, The Reader Organisation

This Christmas I will be reading Eat, Pray, Love as it’s been recommended (highly and on numerous occasions) to me by friends as a fantastically uplifting read. So, that’s for the lighter moments (or should I say, heavier as I will be weighted down with goose, mulled wine and chocolates by then) and for the other times, when I feel I can face a bit more of a challenge, I have Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?.

I will be giving (and I hope none of my family or friends read this): The Quantum of Solace by Ian Fleming and Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris,  both collections of short stories for busy people that tell me they have ‘no time to read’, I hope this will be an encouragement; Judith Kerr’s The Tiger that Came for Tea (not for a child but for someone that still wished, in a way, that he was) and Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale, a novel about a tormented artist and the legacy she leaves behind after her death.

Sarah Coley, Deputy Editor, The Reader

I’m finally finishing George Eliot’s Romola on my fifth attempt in five years. Eighty pages to go and I have no idea what happens. Please: no clues. It’s a puzzling book. All the way through, it’s as though handsome, clever and devious Tito should be saveable except that no one can get past his smooth defences to show him that he needs saving. It’s as if in another George Eliot book, Middlemarch you could go back to Mr Bulstrode’s youth and still not be able to intervene. Perhaps some sin is necessary — a Christmas thought to share with you all!

And I’ve got Mark Cocker’s great natural history book Crow Country (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction prize this year). Marshy wanderings, cold Dumfrieshire nights, and magnificent hordes of rooks making their daily journeys to and from their roosts. In some ways, this is a literary book, even a George Eliot kind of book, in that Cocker takes the most familiar and provincial of birds, the crow, and makes you pay good heed to its doings and ways. This is the book I would give as a gift (if of a giving disposition). Crows are good people. 

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 Josie Billington, Research and Development Manager, The Reader Organisation

Giving Alice Munro’s Carried Away - selected short stories, deft and deep, for busy person who has to come and go with books – and John Berger’s From A to X: A Story in Letters because his books are eloquent, serious, edgy, fierce all at once. Have read nothing quite like the intimate impersonality of the narrator’s almost out-of-life perspective in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead so will be reading Home (sequel). For kids, Michael Morpurgo, This Morning I Met a Whale and Neil Gaiman The Graveyard Book. Non-fiction, Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise. 

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Chris Catterall,  Business manager, The Reader Organisation

Over Christmas I intend to read A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini. This was recently purchased for me as a birthday present.  I have tried to read this book before bedtime,  however I haven’t got passed the first 100 pages yet.  I plan to give it some proper time over Christmas.

I intend to buy my flat mates QI: Advanced Banter by Stephen Fry.  I am not too keen on this program, largely because it is too complicated for late night television.   I am hoping the book will deter them from watching QI on the TV.

Chosen by Katie Peters, Project Worker, Get Into Reading

It’s a bit of fun that takes me back my childhood, when my mother read this to me. I love the rhythm of the poem, which seems to gather pace as you read it. I remember wanting a ‘big, red india-rubber ball’ myself after reading this, and feeling quite sorry for King John hanging his ‘hopeful stocking’ out. It works well alongside Good King Wenceslas in a reading group, and I usually find that although King John is ‘not a good man’, people feel affection for him and connect to something in this poem, perhaps his resilient hopefulness or the real anxiety which ‘bedews his brow’, or more likely the authentic lurching between these two states.

King John’s Christmas

King John was not a good man –
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
And men who came across him,
When walking in the town,
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air –
And bad King John stood dumbly there,
Blushing beneath his crown.

King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon…
But no one came to tea.
And, round about December,
The cards upon his shelf
Which wished him lots of Christmas cheer,
And fortune in the coming year,
Were never from his near and dear,
But only from himself.

King John was not a good man,
Yet had his hopes and fears.
They’d given him no present now
For years and years and years.
But every year at Christmas,
While minstrels stood about,
Collecting tribute from the young
For all the songs they might have sung,
He stole away upstairs and hung
A hopeful stocking out.

King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR -
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”

“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man –
He wrote this message out,
And gat him to this room again,
Descending by the spout.
And all that night he lay there,
A prey to hopes and fears.
“I think that’s him a-coming now!”
(Anxiety bedewed his brow.)
“He’ll bring one present, anyhow –
The first I had for years.”

“Forget about the crackers,
And forget the candy;
I’m sure a box of chocolates
Would never come in handy;
I don’t like oranges,
I don’t want nuts,
And I HAVE got a pocket-knife
That almost cuts.
But, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”

King John was not a good man,
Next morning when the sun
Rose up to tell a waiting world
That Christmas had begun,
And people seized their stockings,
And opened them with glee,
And crackers, toys and games appeared,
And lips with sticky sweets were smeared,
King John said grimly: “As I feared,
Nothing again for me!”

“I did want crackers,
And I did want candy;
I know a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I do love oranges,
I did want nuts!
And, oh! if Father Christmas, had loved me at all,
He would have brought a big, red,
india-rubber ball!”

King John stood by the window,
And frowned to see below
The happy bands of boys and girls
All playing in the snow.
A while he stood there watching,
And envying them all …
When through the window big and red
There hurtled by his royal head,
And bounced and fell upon the bed,
An india-rubber ball!

AND, OH, FATHER CHRISTMAS,
MY BLESSINGS ON YOU FALL
FOR BRINGING HIM
A BIG, RED,
INDIA-RUBBER
BALL!

A. A. Milne

Samantha Shipman Project Worker, Get Into Reading

One of the books I will be giving this Christmas is Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine. This book has made the long list for Wirral Paperback of the Year and will hopefully be on the short list when voting closes. When reading it I couldn’t help thinking that my 14 year old cousin would love it as the main character reminded me of her.

One of the books I will be reading this Christmas is The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. My main reason for wanting to read it is that it is set in India, a country I would love to visit but know very little about. It has also won the Man Booker Prize this year and so should be a good read.

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Angela Macmillan Co-editor, The Reader

Books I am hoping to read, if someone gives them to me after all the lists I have left lying casually around the house, include Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan, because I keep hearing good things about this tale of a man holed up in a log cabin in freezing Maine ‘working his way through his father’s library of 3,282 classics, using the wall-to-wall books as insulation – literally and metaphorically – against the prevailing conditions outside.’ Also I will need something of the nineteenth century so either Rachel Ray by Trollope or Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
A friend is convalescing after a recent operation. I have sent him Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurty’s western epic and a truly wonderful read. I never thought I would like to read westerns but this is much more than that. To a young friend of 10 years I am giving The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznic. A completely absorbing and exciting story told sometimes in narrative and sometimes in sequences of charcoal drawings. Very highly recommended for all ages from 8 onwards

Chris Routledge Blog Man, The Reader Online

We’ll see how the fancy takes me at the time, but at the moment I’m planning to read The Great Gatsby again, because it is so clean and light and melancholy that it will be an antidote to the heavy puddings and dark days of late December.

Books are probably the most difficult presents to give, unless someone has asked for a title specifically. But that can be a problem too. This year my daughter–a long-term Rev. Awdry fan–has asked for a book called Thomas and the Rainbow. I’m pretty sure she knows doesn’t exist and is using to see if Father Christmas really does. She has asked for this book several times, and has specifically mentioned it on visits to see Santa in grottoes around the North West. Naturally we’re going to have to write it, because if Santa isn’t real, parents of four year-olds have a duty to cover for him.”

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Mary Weston Project Worker, Get Into Reading

My reading: At the moment I am working my way through Solzhenizin’s Cancer Ward. I bought it a while back because I was looking for political novels to teach for my CE course. I decided against it because we had already done Camus’s The Plague, and it was a little too similar, but I promised myself I would read it someday, and am now. It’s not quite as depressing as it sounds, but then I also enjoyed The Magic Mountain, another long book about being ill. When I get done I plan to read Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Lessings Sirian Experiments.

So far the only book I have bought any one is non-fiction, Abbott Christopher Jamieson’s Finding Happiness. I haven’t read it myself yet, but I really enjoyed the TV series on The Monastery when it came on, a year or two ago. I was doing the Phoenix House group at the time, and it was fascinating to see the similarities in the processes the people were going through. I bought this book for my brother-in-law who is an overworked parish priest.

Mark Till Volunteer, The Reader Organisation 

Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes by Will Self

Perhaps not the most festive choice – “a collection of stories featuring different people suffering from different forms of liver damage” – (especially in light of the approaching Reader Christmas Party…) but Will Self is never dull and always thought-provoking.

Giving:

Collected Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s prose is the most fun you can have on paper. These sixty-five stories (“dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives”) span his entire career and are the perfect introduction to the great man’s work. Beats socks any day.

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John Scrivener Co-Editor, The Reader

‘I like to re-read a Dickens novel around Christmas, and this year it must be Little Dorrit, to remind myself of all the dimensions necessarily missing from the recent TV adaptation. I intend to give (and hope also to receive) Rowan Williams’ new book on Dostoyevsky – Williams’ imagination is both literary and theological, so I expect this to be good: check out his article on The Devils in The Reader magazine.

A couple of weeks ago The Reader Organisation nominated two people for the National Year of Reading ‘Reading Heroes’ awards. One of these was our Director, Jane Davis (in the Professional category) and the other was Get Into Reading and Wirral Community Shakespeare member Louise Jones (in the Personal category). We are delighted to have been told that both of them have won Reading Hero awards!

Reading Hero, Louise Jones, speaking about her reading experiences at the GIR Get-together 2008

The National Year of Reading wanted to acknowledge and celebrate twenty-five Reading Heroes as the year draws to a close. They were looking for people whose personal effort to support reading has made a difference to others, or whose acquisition of reading skills in challenging circumstances has transformed their own lives, or that of another. Jane and Louise are two of twenty-five people that will be heading to No. 10 Downing Street in February 2009 to meet with Sarah Brown and receive their Reading Hero medals.

You’ll be hearing more about this as the visit to Downing Street gets nearer. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more about how Louise has developed a passion for reading Shakespeare and transformed her life, or about Jane’s dedicated vision to bring about a Reading Revolution, then please contact us.