Book Club

As there seems to be a fair amount of interest in creating a book club on the development I have been doing some research on line (not being one to reinvent the wheel) into some best practices of setting up and running book clubs/groups.  From the amount of interest so far it is envisaged that there will be numerous groups within the club.

If you would like to start a themed group or join an existing general interest group please go to Contact Us and send us an email stating your area of interest.

The following points maybe helpful as guidelines:

Size of Group

Eight people to a group seems to be the optimum number – if several can’t make it on the day there are still enough to hold a lively conversation and the group as a whole is not too large to accommodate in most people’s homes.

Frequency of Meetings

Meetings can be every month, although it seems that once every 5 or 6 weeks allows more time to read the book, bearing in mind everyone’s busy schedules.  Booking all eight meetings at the outset means that people arrange their diaries around the meeting, not the other way around.

Timing of Meetings

Probably best to set length of the meetings right at the beginning so that those who need to know what time they are getting back for babysitters etc can leave at prescribed time without embarrassment, even if others linger to chat.

Apparently 2.5 to 3 hours works well for maintaining interest and allowing enough time for issues to be discussed and justify the time you have spent reading the book!

Make-up of a group

This, of course, could depend on the theme of the Group.  However, it would be nice, at least for general interest groups, to have a diverse mixture of people, ages, gender and so forth.

Groups can choose a theme for their reading.  Possible themes could be Mystery/Thrillers, The Classics, Political non-fiction, War, Autobiographies, Regency Romances etc or they could remain General Interest.

Whatever the theme each member could pick a book of their choice.  This ensures a wide range of reading and hopefully you will be introduced to some authors and ideas you might not otherwise have come across.

The alternative is that the group gets together initially to thrash out their eight month’s reading list. Useful to decide all the book choices upfront, whether as each individual’s choice or group decision, so there is no risk of there being a gap.  This way those who want to read ahead have the opportunity.

Resources to help in book choice:

Paperbacks are likely to be cheaper and also more likely to be sold on Amazon in the second hand category.

Informal or more formal group.

You can choose a general chat around the table or a more formalised program centred around a set list of questions.

For the more informal style it would at least be helpful if the host/hostess, who has also probably chosen the book, gives a brief introduction of what they felt about the book.  It’s not about being intellectual it’s all about your personal observations which, of course, may be completely different from everyone else’s and that hopefully will lead to stimulating conversation. Everyone then goes away with a new insight into the book.

Don’t forget you can put the title and author into google and read up on reviews or check out the publisher’s websites.  Amazon often provides reader’s reviews.  All helpful in broadening your views!

Time-Saving Tips

Why not jot down short notes on a postcard while reading the book – then you won’t have to scrabble through it the night before to remind yourself.  Post-it notes are great for marking pages that you may want to refer to. You might want to think about your emotional response to the book, characterisation, themes, most memorable parts (descriptions/dialogue), strengths and weaknesses..

Catering

As far as catering goes, my suggestion is that it would be best to keep it simple – how about a glass of wine, crisps/dip and maybe a coffee later? That way it keeps cost down and there really is no food preparation to do.

Book Selection

I have made a cursory selection of books, just as an idea and to get people thinking.  You can, of course, choose whatever you and your group fancy!

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

A New York Times Bestseller.  A decade after the publication of this hugely popular international bestseller, Picador releases the tenth anniversary edition of The Red Tent.

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that tell of her father, Jacob, and his twelve sons.

Told in Dinah’s voice, Anita Diamant imagines the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood–the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of the mothers–Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah–the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through childhood, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah’s story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past.

Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new view of biblical women’s lives.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and Anne Born

Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he’s out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.

I capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Now a major motion picture from the Academy Award-winning producer of Shakespeare in Love

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle’s walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has “captured the castle”–and the heart of the reader–in one of literature’s most enchanting entertainments.

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

A thrilling journey into the minds of African elephants as they struggle to survive.   

If, as many recent nonfiction bestsellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must also have stories. In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own.

For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps, and deserts of the sub-Sahara. Now the earth is scorched by drought, and the mutilated bodies of family and friends lie scattered on the ground, shot down by ivory hunters. Nothing-not the once familiar terrain, or the age-old rhythms of life, or even memory itself-seems reliable anymore. Yet a slim prophecy of hope is passed on from water hole to water hole: the sacred white bone of legend will point the elephants toward the Safe Place. And so begins a quest through Africa’s vast and perilous plains-until at last the survivors face a decisive trial of loyalty and courage.

In The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy performs a feat of imagination virtually unparalleled in modern fiction. Plunged into an alien landscape, we orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, “what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperilled, and to have that prodigious memory.”

Stonewall’s Gold by Robert J. Mrazek

Stonewall’s Gold is an adventure story for readers of all ages in the classic tradition of Treasure Island and The Red Badge of Courage. Combining a fascinating and gripping narrative with a portrait of life in the Civil War–era South, it is also the moving story of a boy on the edge of manhood, taking on difficult challenges that force him to confront the world for the first time.

The year of 1864 is a difficult time to be living in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. The Civil War is drawing to a close and, under the orders of General Sheridan, Union troops have laid waste to the countryside. Against this bleak backdrop, Jamie Lockhart’s mother takes on a boarder to help her eke out a living until her husband returns from the war.

Soon, someone begins desecrating local soldier’s graves, and Jamie, an intrepid fifteen-year-old, discovers that their boarder is the culprit. Confronted, the boarder assaults Jamie’s mother; defending her, Jamie kills him. In his personal effects Jamie discovers the item he was looking for in the graveyard, a cryptic map to Stonewall’s gold. Thus begins Jamie’s quest.

Along the way, Jamie is faced with the best and the worst in human nature, and meets a young girl and falls in love for the first time. He becomes privy to the hidden politics behind the war when he stumbles upon escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, and he is also forced to confront the ugly realities of war and the absurdity of the lost cause in the final days of the conflict.

A ripping adventure yarn, a moving coming-of-age tale, and a fascinating portrait of the difficulty of life in the Appalachians at the end of the Civil War, Stonewall’s Gold is a compelling novel that is certain to appeal to teacher and student alike.

Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne

Opening dramatically with the horrors of the 2005 London bombings, this is the profoundly moving story of a country on the brink of civil war and a child’s struggle to come to terms with loss. London. On a bright July morning a series of bombs brings the capital to a halt. Simon Swann, a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals, is searching frantically amongst the chaos and the rubble. All around police sirens and ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running, and he is distraught. But who is he looking for? To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka, and its community is on the brink of civil war. Alice’s life is about to change forever. Soon she will have to leave for England, abandoning her beloved grandfather, and accompanied by her mother Sita, a woman broken by a series of terrible events. In London, Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she has a son. Slowly she fulfils her grandfather’s prophecy and becomes an artist. Eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty-first century is a mass of migration and suspicion. The war on terror has begun and everyone, even Simon Swann, middle class, rational medic that he is, will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected and terrible way.

Wedlock by Wendy More

Wedlock is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain’s richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young and, pregnant with her lover’s child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week. But nothing was as it seemed. Stoney was broke, and his pursuit of the wealthy Countess a calculated ploy. Once married to Mary, he embarked on years of ill treatment, seizing her lands, beating her, terrorising servants, introducing prostitutes to the family home, kidnapping his own sister. But finally after many years, a servant helped Mary to escape. She began a high-profile divorce case that was the scandal of the day and was successful. But then Andrew kidnapped her and undertook a week-long rampage of terror and cruelty until the law finally caught up with him.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

When Dr Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons during an archaeological dig in southern France, she unearths a link with a horrific and brutal past. But it’s not just the sight of the shattered bones that makes her uneasy – there’s an overwhelming sense of evil in the tomb that Alice finds hard to shake off, even in the bright French sunshine. Puzzled by the words carved inside the chamber, Alice has an uneasy feeling that she has disturbed something which was meant to remain hidden…

The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld

A dazzling literary thriller – the story of Sigmund Freud assisting a Manhattan murder investigation. The Interpretation of Murder is an inventive tour de force inspired by Sigmund Freud’s 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protégé and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious apartment overlooking the city, and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate, the mayor of New York calls upon Freud to use his revolutionary new ideas to help the surviving victim recover her memory of the attack, and solve the crime.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

‘Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies…’ A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation. The narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other echo down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This extraordinary, magical novel is the story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically, his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

In the bitter winter of 1847 the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster. On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Meridith and his family, an aspiring novelist, a maker of revolutionary ballads – all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home.

Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson

In Kalooki Nights, Max Glickman grew up in north Manchester in the 1950s in a secular Jewish family. His father was an ex-boxer and his mother spent her time playing kalooki with friends. He’s a cartoonist who creates graphic stories about Jewish suffering, even though he’s moved away from his religion and married outside of it. His life, though, is comically woven through Jewish traditions and stereotypes. His childhood friend, Manny, came from an unhappy Orthodox family and he murdered his parents. As Manny is to be released from prison, a TV company convinces Max to look up his old friend do a treatment on him. As Max helps Manny uncover his past and the reasons for his actions, they eventually lead to the Holocaust, drawing Max back into the faith he’s rebelled against. Howard Jacobson’s novel uses comedy to explore tragedy, and Kalooki Nights has received positive reviews. The Observer says, “It is likely to be the funniest book published this year.”