This week’s Recommended Read comes from Lois Walters, our Lambeth Get Into Reading Project Worker, who has returned again and again to W Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil.

I was a late comer to Somerset Maugham; perhaps wrongly thinking him a white male colonial writer, but The Painted Veil has converted me. His 1925 depiction of a woman’s journey from shallow social privilege to spiritual awakening and maturity took me on journey that reflected that of the woman, Kitty.  From South Kensington in London, through Hong Kong and the cholera ridden remote depths of mainland China Kitty and I, stumbling at times, discovered a world beyond our own.

The book’s title refers to Shelley’s sonnet ‘Lift Not The Painted Veil’ which suggests we should ‘lift not the painted veil’ of life for ‘behind, lurk Fear and Hope, twin destinies’.  At the start of the novel Kitty leads a vacuous and superficial life – her destiny defined by her social status and gender. The book cleverly mirrors Kitty’s intellectual and mental  state- starting with short, often mawkish chapters where the characters are given  physical descriptions and little depth, and then developing into longer deeper chapters as Kitty, often accidentally (or through destiny), is exposed to a world beyond privileged South Kensington between the wars.

The opening chapter is one of great tension before Maugham flashes back and forth between past and present explaining to the reader how Kitty comes to be caught in flagrante delicto in the opening pages. Even after several reads it still amazes me that the book was first published in 1925, and more amazingly that it was written by a man. As Maugham slowly lifts the painted veil of Kitty’s life we the readers are drawn into her world, as she, in the words of the poem ‘sought…things to love’. Kitty like most of the characters is not wholly likeable; she is vain, judgemental and selfish – or perhaps, real? We discover as the book opens up that behind the painted veil of her life do indeed lurk fear and hope; Kitty marries a man she doesn’t love, or even really know, out of fear that she will be ‘left on the shelf’- partly spurred on by the chance that her younger sister  will beat her to the altar. She then experiences hope when she falls in love with Charlie and starts an affair with him, only to then be sent back to fear as he lets her down and she is forced to travel to cholera ridded Mei-tan-fu with the husband she does not love.

Shelley’s poem refers to hope and fear as ‘twin destinies’ and throughout the book we see them juxtaposed. Not just for Kitty though. Her cold and calculating mother fears that Kitty, when she is still unmarried at 25 (again important to remember the book was written in 1925), will be a burden on the family. One of the parts of the book that I found most disturbing is when Kitty arrives in Mei-tan-fu, full of fear, and thinks of running away but then realises

It was out of the question. If she went where would she go? Not to her mother; her mother would make her see very plainly that, having married her off, she counted on being rid of her.

But there is still the hope that her lover Charlie may come to her rescue, for Kitty has not yet lifted the painted veil that she has draped over Charlie Townsend hiding the reality that he is also self serving and superficial.

One of the reasons I love the book is that although Kitty is selfish and vacuous, she is also a product of her environment. She is naive and sheltered, there to look pretty and support her husband – but as we see her thrown into situations she is unfamiliar with she shows as certain bravery and stoicism. She also matures and starts to see the world outside her very parochial upbringing. There is a very beautiful scene, when she has arrived in Mei-tan-fu and is miserable and missing Charlie. She awakes from dreaming about him and observes the morning mist slowly dispersing and;

suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand.

This vision moves Kitty to tears and is the start of her spiritual maturity (and I think the moment that the members of my Get Into Reading group started to empathise with her);

she had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty. She took it as the believer takes in his mouth the wafer which is God

The novel opens up as Kitty opens her eyes to the outside world and Maugham subtly changes the structure of the writing. Kitty is still flawed and selfish, but she is also human, for which of us has not made mistakes and shown poor judgement at some point in our lives?

I have read the book now twice on my own and once with a Get Into Reading group and still find much to love about it. Sharing it with others, who admittedly at times struggled to see the advantage of reading it during the early chapters when it seemed to be a novel filled with privileged and shallow character, has made me cherish it more.

I would like to thank my Get Into Reading group members at the Lambeth Walk Group Practice for their inspiring reactions to the novel and their trust that it is a book worth sticking with. It is!

This was one of those book purchases that falls into my – or should I say ‘the,’ perhaps others will empathise – ‘I didn’t know anything about it but it just attracted me’ category. Its procurement from an obscure charity shop made my acquisition all the more mysterious, and the subsequent life experience that the book spilled perhaps seemed even more significant as a result of the lack of any prior knowledge  or preconceptions on my part.  I bought it in the summer holiday between the second and third year of my degree studies, one of the slightly unsettling and thrilling periods of time as a student in which I suddenly had bit of space to read what I wanted, and time to do so. My reading habits have always benefitted from a change of scene, and so back at my family home I sped through the pages of Guo’s novel, which tells the story of Zhuang (or ‘Z,’ as she introduces herself to others, anticipating the mispronunciation of her full name) who is sent from China to London by her parents to learn English.

Indeed, the change of scene I was subject to in moving home for the summer is somewhat incomparable to the experience of Z, who is thrust into the bustle and unfamiliarity of the unaccommodating capital city. Z’s narrative voice is a reflection of her own broken English and journey towards fluency, and although this aspect could potentially jar with some readers, for me it only served to make the book all the more compelling. Any novel that breaks away from conventional prose has often already won half the battle in endearing me just through doing so. Remarking upon the complexities of grammar, Z contests that in China, ‘We are bosses of our own language.’ But the narrative that is delivered undeniably presents her as very much in charge of English, too, albeit in a non-standard way. The unconventional word combinations and comments on everything from baked beans to the pub make the book what it is – an original, amusing, bittersweet understanding of the world and a chapter of a life.

At the centre of the novel is what is essentially a love story between Z and an –interestingly – an unnamed man. This is interwoven with snippets of Chinese history and culture, often told through Z’s accounts and recollections of her family and their life. I particularly liked the structure of the novel, with each chapter title an excerpt/definition from Z’s precious Chinese-English dictionary, which the following chapter is linked to in some way. Through this, the novel explores the relationship between rules, ideas and definitions on the one hand, and real life situations on the other, as Z’s perception of the world expands and is challenged. I found it difficult to bear witness to this, fictional though it may be, and not be prompted to re-assess my own perceptions and understanding on some level, too – one of the many powerful things that reading can do.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo, Chatto and Windus (2007)

All too often classic tomes are reduced in length and detail as to make them more accessible to the modern imagination.  Those who haven’t read Dickens’s Oliver Twist could be forgiven for not having heard of Rose Maylie – the orphan’s long-lost aunt.  Similarly, perhaps it is only Janeites (and those of us who are fans of Austen, but who can’t bring ourselves to use the J-word) who are au fait with Charlotte Lucas’s romantic dilemma in Pride and Prejudice.

Time has a habit of chopping away those fatty parts of a story it deems unpalatable. 

And so, the numerous adventures reserved for Gulliver have been discarded in the modern mind, bar one: his voyage to the land of Lilliput, with its six-inch tall inhabitants.  It is here that Swift employs his most scathing polemic on English society.  The triviality of war, the ineptitude of politicians (some things never change), and the insignificant details that separate church from church are all handled with the author’s typical wit and flair.

Perhaps it is Swift’s critique of the feud between the Catholic Church and the Church of England that is most worthy of mentioning.  Here we read that all Lilliputians originally split their eggs open by cracking the big end, and are subsequently known as big-endians.  But there were those who decided to give the small end a whirl, converting (as it were) to small-endians.  The two factions separated, with the small-endians becoming dominant and their counterparts being denounced and marginalised.  If there is a more accurate or memorable satire on the trifling nature of religion, I am yet to read it.

For those of you who know me already, I do a lot of commuting between Preston and Liverpool to get to The Reader so I can do my bit for the communications team. And put plainly, commuting is the worst. Sitting on tin-can Northern trains and rattling through Lancashire to Merseyside in a cramped, overcrowded carriage can become quite onerous. If it wasn’t for a Thermos full of steaming coffee, Twitter on my phone, and a good book, I wouldn’t make it past Wigan.

I decided that a book would be my greatest ally in such circumstances, and that I’d reread Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to get me through the first few journeys. I’ve read it once before; I was around 15 -16 years old and I read it to look cool mainly. I’d just started listening to real music with meaningful lyrics and began enjoying proper films, the classics. To my pretentious teen-self I looked very cool indeed on the bus to college, head buried in a definitive American novel. That being said, a lot of the novel escaped me, the plot ran rings around me. I was too concerned with the fashion of the novel to understand fully what it really was about America that Kerouac was presenting the world.

So, on the railroad, whizzing back and forth to The Reader, I have been quietly devouring the book and getting reacquainted with Jack Kerouac’s wild, mad America while traversing the wild, mad pastures of north-west England.

On The Road is a blend of fiction and autobiography. It follows Sal Paradise, a fictional representation of Kerouac himself, as he hurries exuberantly across America during the 40s and 50s in search of the American dream. On his travels he befriends a true madman, Dean Moriarty: a man with few limits; a man that finds awe in everything and everybody. Their unrelenting journey on the road to personal release and fulfilment is peppered with drink, drugs, sex and jazz: the ultimate modern, hedonistic cocktail.

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”

The novel reads like an outpouring of thought. Words spew off the page with unstoppable force, like thoughts falling out of Kerouac’s mind. He famously wrote On The Road in three weeks on a continuous, 120ft long manuscript made up of taped-together pieces of tracing paper which he called ‘the scroll.’ However, the published novel is the result of a mammoth creative process, the consolidation of the extensive scribblings and observations in Kerouac’s notebooks, which he used to capture his real-life experiences and the people he encountered on the road.

This type of spontaneous prose is the ideal accompaniment for journeys. Guiding myself through the epic sentence structures, the lengthy descriptions of hitch-hiked car journeys, heavy parties and almost preternaturally long jazz sessions carried me from Preston to Liverpool and back again in no time at all.

Sal’s time on the road – the result of a feeling ‘that everything was dead’ – spans years. He settles sporadically, but can’t resist the free life. The novel catapults him across America as if time is subordinate: something that inevitably passes by, but something that mustn’t get in the way of experience. All the themes explored by the characters’ actions converge throughout the story. Isolation and alienation, detachment, possession and freedom: this is all of America, past and present, in 290 pages.

A reading of On The Road will make you yearn for fresh experiences. Rereading the book on a crowded commuter train, leaving Lancashire in my wake, I longed for the wide-open vistas of America; the expansive black roads stretching beyond the horizon; the blistering seats of an old Cadillac; a mad friend, with whom I could experience all that life has to offer…  I don’t mean this literally – because I can’t drive and can be a very car-sick passenger – but in essence. On The Road instils a sense of possibility in the reader, that there are an infinite amount of experiences out there to be experienced. And at this time in my life – degree in hand, internship underway – new and exciting experiences are very much attainable…

On the Road, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Classics (1957/2000)

‘They are honest insects, butterflies. They may get one’s attention with spots and swirls, great flourishes of colour, displays of dazzling brilliance. One does not have to look all that closely, however, to see how fragile that beauty is, how it is held together by the worm that it once was, and will be again.’

This beautifully written book tells of loss, life, love and something approximating love. Set in the north of Ireland in the 1800’s, the story is made up of parts of a fractured whole, brought together through its varied ‘tellings’, its diverse time-zones, its different authors. There is Maddie, speaking to a different generation from her place in a nursing home of her time as a servant in ‘the Castle’. Then there is her Mistress, Harriet, who, despite being the authoritative voice of the castle, struggles with parental authority, particularly in instilling respect and discipline in her children. Trying to teach them ‘lessons’, Harriet takes to locking them in the ‘wardrobe room’ for a time, a windowless room with nothing to do but think – a harsh precursor of ‘time-out’. It is in this room, during a period of thinking on the crime that has warranted the punishment, that her young daughter, Charlotte, tragically dies. We learn of Harriet’s story through the pages of a diary she kept during her incarceration in prison for Charlotte’s murder, but it reappears constantly in the telling of Maddie’s story to Harriet’s grandchild, Anna. ‘It’s an odd thing, isn’t it’, says Maddie, ‘the way the past has no interest for the young till it comes galloping up on the back of the future.’

I read with women at a Belfast prison every Wednesday. There was recently some fascination with a dull humming sound coming from high up in our reading room, which turned out to be a wasp. A really big wasp. It was tired, presumably locked in, a prisoner itself, but faring poorly in its unnatural surroundings. We were wondering, quite selfishly, if it had any fight left, whether it would sting us or not. Despite its intimidating size, it was not interested in us. It merely wanted freedom, and every ounce of its strength went into fighting that battle at a window that will never open. From her own prison cell, Harriet remembers her butterfly collection, her caged little bits of ‘sky’.

‘How hard the smallest of creatures will try for life. Constantly under threat, they devise new methods for survival. Everything they do is for the continuation of the species: to mature, to reproduce, to die. One aim, one goal in mind, so beautifully simple. I wonder, have I succeeded or failed? I am better than what I have done, than the one act for which I have been reviled, will be remembered.’

So too, are the women in that room. I wouldn’t necessarily read The Butterfly Cabinet with my group – not because it’s not a great read, because it really is. I would read it with everyone who has not been in prison. They need it more. It challenges the reader to think from a range of perspectives – same story, different interpretations, different emotions, different readings – The Butterfly Cabinet could metonymically represent the kinds of things that happen in shared reading groups all over, in all environments; the intersections of life stories, the retrieval of all the parts, the identification of the self in them, the fitting of the pieces together, and a need, a desperate need, to make sense.   

 The Butterfly Cabinet, Bernie McGill, Headline (2011)

Orlando Orange and the Big Scary Bear was an exciting story. The story was about a bear and an onion and an orange. Orlando went into the forest even though he was scared and he got the ball back.

I liked it all. There was nothing I didn’t like. I liked Ozzy Onion best because he was really funny when he kicked the ball. The pictures were really nice. I like the stickers best of all.

I would like to read Charlie Chilli next.

By Cameron, aged 6.

Here he is, a pocket sized Ray Mears. Well, ok, a racist, imperialist,  17^th Century version of Ray Mears, who actually, if you go by the picture in my hard-backed copy, looks rather like a distant relative of Lady Gaga. Lord Crusoe, ripped, bearded and wild eyed like Nooky bear, with a tan that makes David Dickinson look as though he bathes daily in the milk of a very white ass, is resplendent in goat-fur culottes, with matching gilet, sporting on top of his head what looks like a coconut squashed into a furry pencil case.  To accessorise, he carries a gun, which let’s be honest is bigger than Friday, the grateful ‘native’ who prostrates at Robinson’s hobbity toes, in thanks for being rescued from … Oh, I can’t tell you that! The gun is probably the contemporary equivalent of a man driving a Ferrari.  However, since Freud hadn’t been born by then, we can dispense with the phallic symbolism.

Daniel Defoe’s grand title for this ripping sea-farer’s log is that of ‘The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe –Mariner.’ This is highly misleading and should be changed for ‘Robinson Crusoe -Marooner’ for in the grand scheme of things, he really doesn’t do that much sailing. I’m not going to spoil it for you, you will probably need some sea-sickness tablets at the start. However, you really should read this book for a freeing picture of life without twitter, mobiles, Google, or people!  You can instead catch your own parrot and teach it to talk and if you like you can also maim a few goats and keep them as pets. As a vegetarian, I did not like this book; as a thinking, feeling human being, I loved this book. Crusoe has a way of sharing his thoughts and feelings with you, that at times it was like a crab of emotion had pincered my heart. It was gripping, sudden and made me gasp.

On one of his dark night(s) of the soul (there are quite a few), when he finds a footprint in the sand, he is thrown into a bubbling swamp of paranoia and fear:

“… I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.” 

I knew exactly how he felt on my own dark Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, when a guy tried to break into my house at 2.00 in the morning. (Funnily enough, he had un-nerving Nooky bear eyes too!) I mean, dear reader, I live in the countryside, where these things don’t happen… I stared out of the window long after he had gone, convinced that the dark, strange outline of my wheelie bin was him, hunkered down, underneath the kitchen windowsill, waiting to pounce.  Crusoe became my new BFF as we joined together in the warmth of a soothing bubble bath the next day and merged our doom-laden cogitations of our demises.  He really was a good guy to have around, because whilst I went and stayed on my friend’s sofa for a couple of days until the heebies had found the jeebies and left.  Poor ole Robin had to stay on his own, with no escape from the Island and sweat it out. I drew strength and inspiration from his courage and wondered if it was humanly possible for me to dig a moat in 24 hours? In the end, it turned out ok for me, and for Robinson? It turned out – sorry, can’t tell you that either!

This is a story of survival, ingenuity, resourcefulness, hope, desperation, faith and adventure. Read it to escape, read it to wonder, read it to despair at the brutality and horrors of slavery, read it to make friends with the faithful Friday and see the world through his eyes, but most of all, read it for the description of Robinson’s inner island –a modern day metro-sexual is our Crusoe –you will not be disappointed. (If you are, boo ya sucks! There is always Heat Magazine for ‘Castaway-Chic’ inspiration)

 Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, Penguin Classics (1719/2003)

I bought this book about two years ago and it has been rising and sinking my slush pile of books ever since. Over the Christmas break I finally sat down to read it.

This book tells the story of the town of Oran, in Algeria in the 1940s, and the struggle of its citizens to combat an outbreak of bubonic plague. Although the clue is very much in the title, and from the first page you may feel as if you know what is coming next, each chapter still manages to build surprise and suspense.

The novel is narrated by an unknown person, who is recounting the effect of the plague upon the town. It brings together straight narrative with information from the notebooks of the mysterious Tarrou, a visitor to Oran who happens to be caught up in the outbreak.

As the people of Oran become prisoners placed under quarantine, each must deal with the separation from those they love, caused by both physical distance and by death. Each must come to terms with what life was like before the plague and what it may be like afterwards.

The largest and most imposing character however, is the Plague itself, which develops its own relationship with those living within its grasp and those that are absent, transforming what may at first seem to be a predicable story into a deeper meditation on life, death, separation and the passage of time.

It is a novel which holds up a mirror up to how we may choose to live in sickness and in health. Not a light read, but one that I would certainly recommend.

The Plague, Albert Camus, Penguin Classics (1947/2002) 

I like Stardust because it’s like reading about two different worlds. The village of Wall is in one world, the human world, and it lies near a stone wall that is the border with another world, the magical kingdom of Stormhold.

The main character is called Tristan, his dad went over the wall when he shouldn’t have done, and he fell in love with a woman who was a slave to a witch. The woman was the daughter of the King of Stormhold. When the King of Stormhold died, all of his sons had to compete to be the last man standing to be the new King.

The story is about what happens when Tristan goes over the wall, and how he faces true love

I liked reading this story because the language and the story was old fashioned and it was magical as well, it had heart eating witches and stars, and you will find out when you read it!

After I had read the book I watched the film, I would recommend watching the film because it’s a really good version of the book.

Stardust, Neil Gaiman, Harper Collins (1998/2006)

Imagine having a sister but she is more like your best friend, you go everywhere with her and you do everything together and when things are getting you down she’ll always be there for you!! Well these two sisters Jodie and Pearl are just like that. They move to a private a school because the parents aren’t happy with their level of education that they are receiving at the public school so they decide to accept their new jobs at Melchester Private school, and they move away to begin their new lives, with their dad as the care taker and their mum as the new head cook of the school. But with the girls finding it particularly difficult to settle in especially Jodie who goes even more wilder and starts acting up at school, they’re starting to regret moving.

Pearl has always been the quiet one who sits in the corner and reads books and has hardly any friends and Jodie has always been the wackier and wilder one who hangs out with her friends till all hours of the morning. But with these sisters it doesn’t matter what their personalities are like they always have time each other. But things are different at Melchester, Pearl makes a whole ton of friends and poor Jodie just hangs round by herself and is taunted by all the ‘posh’ kids, this is since coming to Melchester.

At Melchester they meet a teacher called Mrs Wilberforce who is wheelchair-bound, after falling down the stairs of her tower she broke her neck and is paralysed from the waist down. Mrs Wilberforce has a special place in her heart for Pearl and tells her what had happened for her to be in a wheelchair and warns Pearl never to go up to the tower. Pearl of course tells her sister everything and tells Jodie what had happened to Mrs Wilberforce. Jodie who doesn’t listen to what ever is said, even if it’s for her own safety, she finds a way of nabbing off with her dad’s bunch of keys and gets into the tower. Everything seems to be fine, nothing serious, so Jodie continued to wander off to the tower every evening.

Tragedy strikes, when there is a fireworks display to mark bonfire night. Jodie asks her dad what time the fireworks are due to be let off and then she disappears. Assuming she would be back in time for the display, Pearl doesn’t worry about her. But during the display just after 7:30 Jodie is in the window of the tower and can be seen by everyone on the ground. She’s dressed up as a ghost and scares all the ‘littlies’. She then sees that they are genuinely scared of this ‘ghost’ and start running around in a mad panic, she tries to convince them that the ghost is really her and she leans out of the window a bit too much and loses her balance on her really high red heeled shoes and topples out of the window and lands with a thud on the ground; she died.  The parents and Pearl decide to move away to make a brand new start (especially with the new baby on the way) after the funeral.

Once May was born Pearl writes her a story telling her all about Jodie and what kind of person she was like. She says to her new baby sister “I’ll never ever be such a great sister as Jodie. She’s your sister too, May, and she always will be.” Pearl looks after her sister the way Jodie looked after her.

I would recommend this book for the age 12-15. It’s such a good book but with sadness of some parts of it I don’t think it would be right for a younger age. It had a range of different emotions and it explores the way sisters and families pull together through such hard times.

This was my first book that I have read since starting at The Reader Organisation by myself, as I didn’t really read that much. That bit sounds a bit childish but reading hasn’t always been my strong point but now it’s making its way back into my life and I’m really getting in to reading and starting to love reading.

My Sister Jodie, Jacqueline Wilson, Corgi (2009)