Runaway, by Alice Munro

A book of short stories by Nobel Prize winning Alice Munro, Runaway is a series of looks at life for mostly unsatisfied women in provincial Canada. Yup, it's good!

The Leopard, by Giovanni Tomasi Di Lampedusa

If you'd suggested a book about what happens to the landed gentry during the re-unification of Italy, I'd have rejected it. In fact, the group rejected it many times until Angus persuaded us to read The Leopard, by Giovanni Di Lampedusa. Set in Sicily when Garibaldi and Cavour are re-unifying Italy it's about more than its time. It's a stoic description of how the world changes around a wry and ageing aristocrat. How families go their own way, what you have left at the end of your life... and what happens after you go. Simply marvellous!

The Romantics, Pankaj Mishra

The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra ended up as our book for the summer.

It's a wistful evocation of a young Indian guy's encounter with Europeans in the 90s. Interesting, a bit predictable, and I didn't think the prose was as good as we were told on the covers...

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared.

Well, sometimes we read a dud book. I really wouldn't recommend The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson.

It's apparently a "literary sensation". It's got rave reviews from all over Europe. And it's completely boring.

There's a present day "caper" in which our hero takes off, gets mixed up with crooks, and charming characters before it all works out.

Intersperesed with that is a tedious Forrest Gump-alike back story. It turns out that our hero met Churchill, Stalin, Mao, and a bunch of other big politicos (but not Hitler for some reason). His charm, implacability and unfeasible explosve skills gets him through, but so what?

Madame Bovary

Some of us found it hard going, but I thought Madame Bovary was great and - like Mrs Dalloway and the Grapes of Wrath, I might well not have read it without Book Group....

The Grapes Of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Excellent book.

March.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

There's no need to be afraid of Virginia Woolf, as it turns out. Mrs Dallloway turns out to be startlingly readable and profound.

Read January 2013.

The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ

After Brian Clough and Hitler... Jesus.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ was an interesting read. I can't add much to Rowan Williams' review of it in the Guardian.

That was the book we read for November / December 2012.

Explaining Hitler....

How do you follow Brian Clough? Well, all discussions are supposed to get to Hitler in the end, and now we have.

Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum is a serious attempt to not so much "explain" Hitler and his evil, but to examine and converse with all the different attempts people have made to explain Hitler and his evil.

The introduction sets out some serious points - for instance what do we mean by Hitler's evil. His actions were evil, and he was wrong, but if he believed he was doing good, was he evil?

Does the book go into the more sensationalist stuff? Probably. The index does not include a reference to "testicle, one" or even "monorchism", but the subject is dealt with, in depth in the book...

Read and discussed in September 2012.

The Damned Utd

Next up, a book variously called the best book about football ever, or the best book about sport ever. The Damned Utd by David Peace.

I was handed a World Book Day copy by Dean, who sells me my Big Issue on Charing Cross Road.

I have the feeling it's not going to live up to the reputation...

Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, a good read, rambling and passionate, but a bit creepy in parts.

Many of the characters are apparently based on real ones, and Kureishi's sister has criticised the way he has used his family.

Charlie sounds a lot like Billy Idol to me. (and in indeed Billy Idol was a member of the Bromley Contingent of Sex Pistols fans).

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

This time, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Completely mad, and very inventive. I found it a bit tiresome in parts. It does have the most sensual description of a bike ride that I've read though.

Alone in Berlin, by Hans Fallada

In February, we read Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. A truly stunning book. Taken from the details of a true case, it perfectly describes the terrifying banality - and farcicality - of evil.

It was almost forgotten and only recently translated into English, perhaps owing to the ambiguous nature of Fallada's life. Somewhat similar in outlook to Celine.

A must-read, and I'm glad we did it.

Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. Time to read another play, and a classic at that. The only other items I can remember on the shortlist were the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey.

We meet in December for this one.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre. A great book, morally ambiguous, interesting, and I'm planning to read his others.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. Well, it's a better science book than the Canon was - it's from a real scientist and a real communicator.

Put together by his widow from the notes and transcripts of a lecture series Sagan did in Scotland, it has an over-ambitious title (the lectures were given in Glasgow in the same place where William James gave the lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience ).

It's a good run-through of relations between science and religion in the 1980s and, for me, shows just how much better things could be if they weren't so polarised.

However, it is slightly dated, and suffers from the fact that it is lecture notes - not a "proper" book.

The Gaze by Elif Shafak

The Gaze by Elif Shafak - a Turkish woman, writing about an overweight woman and her lover, a dwarf, who find they can go out unremarked when they both cross-dress. It's got a bunch of other stories in different times, including a woman who is part cat, and some tented show featuring the most beautiful and ugly things in the world.

It seemed kind of affected, till some emotional gears started to mesh two-thirds of the way through, but then it sort of dwindled after that.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban - a cult book, written in a post-Apocalyptic version of the English language, about the rebirth of culture, through gunpowder and Punch and Judy.

Stunning, and one that stays with you a long time.

The Room Of Lost Things

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy is a Brixton book, and one of the best ones I've read. About an old white man handing over his life's work, a dry cleaner's in Coldharbour Lane, to a young Muslim. There are plenty of characters, and lots of scenes that completely bring Brixton back to life for me. And the ending is a quiet shock.

(April 2011)

Frankenstein

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley turned out to be an interesting read. Profound and moving, though the plot seemed so strange, and it was completely soaked in Mary Shelley's life.

I wondered if the book could consistently be read so that the monster was actually a figment of Victor's imagination, and he actually committed the murders himself. You would have to rewrite parts quite a lot, but basically no one ever sees the monster, except the ship's captain and Victor. And Victor's alibis are strong but not completely unshakeable.

Of course, it turns out that Peter Ackroyd has already done this version.

I also watched Young Frankenstein and read Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound - neither of which I'd got round to before. The Aldiss book is very interesting.