Three of mine, Byatt’s Possession, Atwood’s Robber Bride and Handmaid’s Tale were books my bookclub read and were pretty much universally liked by the club.
Are you in a book club? What have you read that you enjoyed? Hated an no one got through? Also general book club info, format, etc.
My club is a women’s group. We have know each other forever, and sometime after we all got done (pretty much) with college we formed a bookclub. We’ve been meeting for seven years. We talk about the book, we try for at least forty five minutes of our three hour meetings, and sometimes, when the book has been really impactful (hate that word, can’t think of a better one right now, please forgive me), can’t stop talking about it for months. When no one has read the book, we gossip and talk about kids and husbands and the past. We finish with dessert. Generally, there are about five or six people who show up, but about twenty members who rotate through depending on what their lives are like and what we are reading. We tend to read in “cycles”- three related books. So right now its detective fiction, first book: The Continental Op. We don’t limit ourselves to fiction - we read (or tried to read, two of us got all the way through) A Brief History of Time, for instance.
Zappo and I are reading Intruder in the Dust by Faulkner. Not a book club, though. I just pressured his yankee-butt to read some Southern lit. I’ve been meaning to read it again for some years now.
Women and Prostitution: A social History by Vern and Bonnie Bullough
Feline Felonies edited by Abigaial Brown
The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke
The Complete T.Rex By John Horner and Don Lessem
all more or less simultaneously…
Oh yeah Justinian’s Sword by James Carroll
I love my book club. It’s a children’s literature book club for women, and we’re on a bimonthly schedule. We just read Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery, the author of the Anne of Green Gables series. Emily isn’t as well known, but I think it’s one of Montgomery’s best books, and an especially interesting read for writers. Emily, the main character (duh), is an aspiring author, and much of the book talks about her passion for writing and fiction.
My book club is reading “The House of Sand & Fog” for its first meeting of the fall after a summer hiatus. I just got started on it so I can’t report on it yet.
The only book we all liked, last year, was “The Saving Graces” by Patricia Gaffney. We’ve got very divergent tastes and it’s rare that everyone likes something. Actually, it bugs me that the only book we all liked was a beach-readingish chick novel, but it was good.
We did a children’s lit 3 book cycle last fall. We all wanted an excuse to talk about Harry Potter. We also did children’s picturebooks, everyone bring a favorite or two to share. And The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe to compare with Harry Potter. It was a lot of fun.
Love L.M. Montgomery and have read the Emily stuff a couple of times