EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club discussion

The Modern selection for March 2026 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, nominated by Lisa.

This discussion will be full of SPOILERS.

❧ What surprised you the most about the book?
❧ Did it live up to your expectations?
❧ What was your experience of Agnes? Did you find her unconventional nature—her knowledge of herbs, her ‘sight,’ her wildness—compelling or challenging?
❧ The chapter tracing the flea and the plague ship across Europe is noteworthy. How did it land for you—did it feel like a zoom-out that added meaning, or did it take you out of the story?
❧ What questions were you left with?

I’ve never read any Shakespeare and I didn’t know anything about “Hamlet” before reading “Hamnet”. I need to look into it a bit further… I’m not sure how true or how close certain aspects of this story were compared to the other.

Have any of you read both?

❧ What surprised you the most about the book? I can’t say that I was necessarily surprised by anything. Perhaps if I had read “Hamlet” first. I don’t know.
❧ Did it live up to your expectations? Yes, I really liked it. My copy was from the library, but I think I’m going to buy one for myself.
❧ What was your experience of Agnes?
Did you find her unconventional nature—her knowledge of herbs, her ‘sight,’ her wildness—compelling or challenging? Compelling for sure! It seems as though Judith may follow in her mother’s footsteps. I wish that Agnes could’ve kept her bird.
❧ The chapter tracing the flea and the plague ship across Europe is noteworthy. How did it land for you—did it feel like a zoom-out that added meaning, or did it take you out of the story? I’m reading a good bit more this year than I normally do. To stay on target, I’ve been using audio to assist me. The audio speed is higher and that in and of itself takes me out of the story because it affects the feel of immersion. When I’m actually reading, I find myself skimming parts like that. If I were reading slower, I would feel differently about it.

I was surprised by how O’Farrell came up with a character like Agnes when the history books have next to nothing on her. She ‘breaths’ on the page as a real person. But she didn’t exist, right? We have no real idea of Shakespeare’s wife. Amazing that we probably think we ‘know’ her now.

I didn’t know what to expect. I have seen movies which compelled me to read the book it was based on. While generally, the book is better than the movie, occasionally the book is worse, even far worse. I didn’t read the book until I saw how the movie was being described as a critic’s choice, so I intentionally didn’t allow myself to expect anything about the book.

I don’t know why but I couldn’t see Shakespeare as Agnes’s husband. For some reason, they seemed mismatched to me as characters. Odd of me, I know. Maybe, it was she seemed too interested in the mundane everyday necessities, and he, although he could create characters like that in plays, I thought he didn’t really respect the intellect of such characters much in his plays. I guess I’m saying, he might look at the dark clouds building up in the sky and think, a mighty storm might be coming, the lightning could be amazing, that would be a good special effect for my play, then I could write a scene of a character afraid because he saw an angry god that visited him on a lightning streak…! And she’d be thinking, it looks like rain, better get the washing in off of the line, maybe I should put a few pots of plants outside. Idk.

When I read about the flea I immediately thought of a great book I had read, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time.

Ps. I've also read and seen the play Hamlet. It's gothic.

I finished this book in two days due to the compelling storyline and diversity length for the chapters. Hamnet seems nothing like Hamlet. Aside from the spelling, they have nothing in common. Even how they die is different from each other.

What surprised me most about the book was Agnes. She seems like she is written by a different person than her husband--who I could not associate with Shakespeare.

Agnes seems like a very spirtual country woman. She feels like she is very a different culture--similar to her being Native American or Irish whereas her husband is England. Makes me wonder where her family's country house is located and it would make the star-crossed lovers theme more poingnant.

The plague explination left me wondering how anyone leaves the house and why it is not common practice to home-grow all your food. If it really is so easy to spread disease, how does anyone manage to visit a grocery store? Why don't we all steam clean ourselves whenever we arrive home?

I appreciated the narrative though I would have preferred a faithful marriage. The descriptions made the story come alive to the extent that reading the text reminded me of people.

Short version: my family has lost three children (one to illness and two to suicide). I have seen how parental loss effects families including a sibling and mother mourning her child forty years after his passing.

parts were slow, parts seemed unrealistic like I would never associate a person like I imagined Shakespeare to be, with a woman like Agnes, although I like Agnes, way more than her husband...
What I liked in the book, and what felt really real, is the sadness, the grief.... the feeling of being lost without a child, of feeling helpless, like you failed or even betrayed the person that depends on you...then the connection between twins, and the question what am I if I lost a twin, not an orphan, not a widow, what am I?...I don't wanna imagine but it felt really deep, I could feel their soul and heart ache… this still makes me sad to think about....