March!

 

Well another month , another book and what a book it is this month.

This month it is “The Divin-Bell And the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

On December 8, 1995, Bauby, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings but physically paralyzed with the exception of some movement in his head and eyes (one of which had to be sewn up due to an irrigation problem). The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). Using partner assisted scanning, a transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome. These events include playing at the beach with his family, getting a bath, and meeting visitors whilst in hospital at Berck-sur-Mer.

The French edition of the book was published on March 6, 1997. It received excellent reviews, sold the first 25,000 copies on the day of publication, reaching 150,000 in a week. It went on to become a number one bestseller across Europe. Its total sales are now in the millions. Bauby died three days after the book was published, on March 9, 1997, of pneumonia

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February!

Hi all,

This month the book of choice will be Catherine de Medici by Leonie Frieda.

‘Leonie Frieda has written a biography of scrupulous detail.’
Ethna Viney, Irish Times

Catherine de Medici was born 13 April 1519 and died 5 January 1589, she was born in Florence Italy. Both her Parents died within weeks of her death.

In 1533, at the age of fourteen, Caterina married Henry, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude of France. Under the Gallicised version of her name, Catherine de Médicis, she was Queen consort of France as the wife of King Henry II of France from 1547 to 1559. Throughout his reign, Henry excluded Catherine from participating in state affairs and instead showered favours on his chief mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who wielded much influence over him. Henry’s death thrust Catherine into the political arena as mother of the frail fifteen-year-old King Francis II. When he died in 1560, she became regent on behalf of her ten-year-old son King Charles IX and was granted sweeping powers. After Charles died in 1574, Catherine played a key role in the reign of her third son, Henry III. He dispensed with her advice only in the last months of her life.

So Let us know what you thought of Leonie Frieda’s Account of Catherine de Medici’s life.

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January!

Hello all and welcome to Lucan Library’s new book club blog.

Like always we will be reading one book a month and then meeting up to talk about that book. We meet the last Wednesday of every month and if you call into us we will let you know what book is for what month.

This month we are reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

This is a book that pivots on a smile. A third of the way through Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” the narrator, a young Pakistani man named Changez, tells an American how he first learned of the destruction of the World Trade Center. While on a business trip to Manila, he turned on the television in his hotel room and saw the towers fall. “I stared as one — and then the other — of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.”

It seems that Hamid would have us understand the novel’s title ironically. We are prodded to question whether every critic of America in a Muslim country should be labeled a fundamentalist, or whether the term more accurately describes the capitalists of the American upper class. Yet these queries seem blunter and less interesting than the novel itself, in which the fundamentalist, and potential assassin, may be sitting on either side of the table.

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