Dear walking book clubbers,
I’m looking forward to seeing some of you this Friday in Regent’s Park, or Sunday on Hampstead Heath for our June walks discussing the powerful novella Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. This is a landmark work of gay literature about a fated love triangle in Paris, between David and Hella - two Americans - and Giovanni, an Italian barman. It opens on the eve of Giovanni’s execution, after David has abandoned him … What follows is a painful articulation of shame and powerful exploration of conflicted desire, convention and sexual identity. For more about this book please watch my little webcast about it HERE or read my introduction here:
Details and booking links for all our June events are below. If you can’t make our walks, there is also our Zoom book club, from 8-9pm next Monday too. And we also have our June live discussion thread coming up, which is a chance to share our recommendations from the past month and on the theme of intersectionality.
Scroll down to read Charlotte’s inspiring walk around Kent. Keep on scrolling for our July events.
In case you missed it, HERE is a brilliant piece about Bookbanks in the Guardian. Thank you for all your good wishes for the charity’s official launch last week!
Our June Giovanni’s Room events
Please note that for the benefit of your fellow walkers, you need to have read the book before coming along to a walking book club. If you’ve not read the book, you are very welcome to join the Zoom instead.
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 21st June, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club: Sunday 23rd June, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 24th June, 8-9pm, £1-15
On Our Reading Radar: Friday 28th June, 1.30-2pm: Intersectionality Join this month’s discussion thread to share your cultural highlights from the month, as well as your recommendations on the theme of INTERSECTIONALITY - What other great books and films explore aspects of compounded prejudice?
Buy Giovanni’s Room from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Charlotte’s walk
Charlotte joined Emily’s Walking Book Club after discovering us at the wonderful Daunt Books Festival in 2023; she has been a thoughtful presence on Zoom and on our Regent’s Park walks ever since. I’m also grateful to her for recommending me some great books! Charlotte works for THE GOLDSMITHS’ CENTRE - a brilliant charity which offers jewellery courses, exhibitions and events about the craft. I’m really excited to be collaborating with them, thanks to Charlotte, this autumn for an urban walking book club through Clerkenwell (where the charity is based) discussing Diamond Street by Rachel Lichtenstein, a fascinating and transporting book about Hatton Garden - its history and its mysteries! I’ll share the booking link when it’s up and hope to see some of you there. In the meantime, do have a look at their other online and in person events, HERE.
I love reading about Charlotte’s project to walk the 360-mile border of Kent. It really shows you how you can find a wonderful adventure on your doorstep. All you need is a little imagination, a strong sense of purpose, some free time and a map! Charlotte writes beautifully about the interplay between the land and human use of it. Thank you so much for taking us on your adventure, Charlotte.
In the summer of 2022, my partner and I began a project. At first slowly, almost incidentally, we started to walk the 360-mile border of our home county of Kent. On our early outings we had no sense of the walk’s length or that it would take 28 days, over many weekends, to complete. But with each new map unfolded and fresh aspect of the county encountered, our excited intent grew. Weekday text messages often referred to our desire to ‘get back on the trail’, as we whisked through the very same countryside on our daily commutes. Since we completed the journey in the autumn of last year, we’ve been asked several times – what was your favourite ‘leg’? And without hesitation we both reply from Cliffe to Hoo! Its remote beauty surprised us both.
We tackled the journey over two days, 16.7 miles on the first, and 17.7 miles on the second. Parking in Cliffe, we made our way out through the town to the ‘edge of the land’ - a phrase I love and borrow from Fay Godwin’s extraordinary photography book of the same name, charting inhabited and remote British coastal locations.
This part of North Kent is bordered at its top by the Thames Estuary, and on its right and lower flanks by the River Medway, as it makes its way out to sea. It connects to the Medway Towns via the Medway Tunnel and bridges at Rochester, but, we found, suffers a strange isolation from this close, populous stretch, due to its watery edges, and marshy tracts. Part of the land – the Isle of Grain – was once separate, but now connected by road and a goods railway.
On reaching the footpath, the broad Thames on our left, the first landmark encountered was Cliffe Fort, built in the 1860s – a guard dog at the estuary’s entrance. The large structure is now frustratingly surrounded by a moat that prevents more in-depth exploration. But its high walls and towers cut an impressive, if decaying, picture against the flatlands and RSPB ‘Cliffe Pools’, from which it rises. We passed the ‘Brennan Torpedo’ launcher – a modest piece of crumbling metalwork – reputed to have been the launch for the first guided missile in the world. This fragment of history and the fort directly abut an aggregates business – a common industry along the Thames – as the product can be easily loaded and shipped. Here we walked under the chute that sends the aggregate out and had to stop as heavy lifting machinery crossed the path.
Having passed through this busy section of human intervention, the east-facing path stretched out, to mile after beautiful mile of wide sky, estuary, and flat land. Viewed on a map, you can see the inland to the right of this stretch is alive with veins that channel the marsh water, so the land is suitable for grazing cattle. We ate lunch at Egypt Bay Beach, sitting on driftwood. This is a rare point where you can descend to sand when the tide is low. On the shore’s edge were multiple, disturbing, coloured fragments of plastic, small and large, washing in.
We were intrigued by a series of small house-type buildings on the marshes – set at regular intervals – without their roofs. And later discovered these were the remnants of a gunpowder and chemical explosives factory built in 1892 and used until the 1920s. The structures had been spaced apart, with light roof structures, so should an explosion occur, the impact would be minimalised.
Picking up the trail again the following weekend, we crossed the low-lying All Hallows and Lees Marshes. As we turned the corner, to come back down and round the peninsula, Grain Tower and Grain Power Station – a huge complex – stood before us. The Tower was built in the mid-19th century as a defensive battery and used during the First and Second World Wars. It sits in the middle of the Medway Estuary and is only accessible on foot at low tide. I enjoyed it’s brutalist, defiant stance, and would love to venture out to it one day.
Over the next stretch, with the Medway now to our left, the footpaths took us a little inland, although still within sight of the edge. We passed Kingsnorth, a second vast power station, with a huge silvery water tank on stilts. In the river, clusters of once active barges were visible, sunk into the mud, green with algae. Dense terraces of houses in Gillingham and Chatham, rising steeply, could be seen across the water. Little more than an hour from London, Grain and Hoo are startlingly sparsely populated, and subsequent conversations suggest little known.
Reaching the end of the second day of walking, from footpaths through farmland we passed into the town of Hoo St. Werburgh, and in search of a bus to take us to the railway station. After the quiet of country walking, whenever we completed any one of the 28 days on the trail, the transition back into a populous place was a jolt, but I particularly remember feeling it in this case, as what we had encountered was so otherworldly.
And how about your walk?
Inspired by Charlotte’s walk? I would love to hear about your walking life. When you have a chance, please reply to this email with a snap or two of a walk that is meaningful to you (please check you have permission to share if anyone else is in your photo; landscape format rather than portrait tends to sit best), along with a couple of lines about the walk and why it’s special for you.
July
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb translated by Len Rix
On his honeymoon in Venice, Mihály manages to lose his wife before embarking on a picaresque journey through Italy, attempting to escape his middle-class life and reconnect to an intense friendship of his adolescence. Funny, bizarre, and psychologically fascinating, Journey by Moonlight is a beloved Hungarian classic, first published in 1937 and brilliantly translated by Len Rix into English in 2000. Antal Szerb, born to assimilated Jewish parents and baptised a Catholic, was murdered at Balf concentration camp in January 1945, aged 43.
Why did I choose it? I first came to this book a decade ago, via Pushkin Press who beautifully publish Szerb’s books alongside their other big heritage author Stefan Zweig. I loved it, but somehow it has remained idle on my shelf all these years until I was recently reminded of it by a Hungarian member of our group. High time to re-read this absolute delight of a book! HERE is an enlightening long piece from the New Republic.
In Regent’s Park: Friday 19th July, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15
On Hampstead Heath: Sunday 21st July, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15
On Zoom: Monday 22nd July, 8-9pm, £1-15
Buy Journey by Moonlight from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Happy walking,
Emily