Book Group

Our book group meets about eight times a year in the Bath Hotel at 6pm. A selection of three books is offered at each meeting, by members in turn, and one is chosen by exhaustive ballot to read for next time. The most dedicated members go on for a curry after having had enough literary discussion to raise an appetite. It was started long ago by Stephen Beck shortly after Alison Beck joined a female only book group. Our group is open to all sexes and genders.

Here is a list of the books we can remember having read in the group (and some we would prefer to forget):

Harry Thompson: This Thing of Darkness.
George Eliot: Silas Marner
Eric Ambler: The Mask of Dimitrios
Honore de Balzac: Eugenie Grandet
Klaus Mann: Mephisto
Alice Munro: Dance of The Happy Shades
Voltaire: Candide
Robert Harris: An Officer and a Spy
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine
George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell: 1984
Alfred Lansing: Endurance
Mary Midgley: Animals And Why They Matter
Rosamond Lehmann: An invitation to the Waltz
Rohinton Mistry: Such a Long Journey
Mikhail Bulgakov: A Country Doctor's Notebook
Ian Rankin: A Question of Blood
Aly Monroe: The Maze of Cadiz
Mick Herron: Slow Horses
Lynda Prescott (ed): A World of Difference: An Anthology of Short Stories from Five Continents
Ned Beauman: The Teleportation Accident
Barbara Kingsolver: The Prodigal Summer
Alan Moore: The Watchmen
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
William Boyd: Restless
Graham Greene: Our man in Havana
Thomas King: Green grass, running water
Ray Celestin: The Axeman's Jazz
Jesse Kellerman: The Brutal Art
Sebastian Faulkes: Engleby
Alexander Masters: Stuart, a life backwards
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
Carl Hiassen: Stormy Weather
Neil Gaiman: American Gods
Ben Aaronovitch: Rivers of London
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
Rudyard Kipling: The Just So Stories
Jane Gardam: Old Filth
James Robertson: The Testament of Gideon Mack
Carlos Acosta: Pig's Foot
Joanna Cannon: The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
Simon Armitage: Walking Home
Peter Carey: The True History of The Kelly Gang
Zadie Smith: White teeth
Antoine Laurain: The President's Hat (Le chapeau de Mitterand)
Philip K Dick: A Scanner Darkly
Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for old men
Philip K Dick: The Crack in Space
Ian McEwan: Amsterdam
Kingsley Amiss: Lucky Jim
Laurent Binet: HHhH
Jeanette Winterson: Why be happy when you could be normal
Tom Perrotta: Election
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Mohammed Hanif: A case of exploding mangoes
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Stuart Maconie: Pies and Prejudice
Carlos Ruiz Zafon: The Shadow of the Wind
Mary Ann Shaffer: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Khaled Hosseini: A Thousand Splendid Suns
Michelle Paver: Dark Matter
Sebastian Barry: The Secret Scripture
Markus Zusak: The Book Thief
Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree
Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop
Ernest Cline: Ready Player One
Jessie Burton: The Miniaturist
Laline Paul: The Bees
Jasper Fforde: One of Our Thursdays is Missing
David Nicholls: Us
Diego Marani: New Finnish Grammar
Tess Gerritsen: Girl Missing
A.D. Miller: Snowdrops
Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Verlyn Klinkenbourg: Timothy's Story
Stephen Kelman: Pigeon English
Gail Honeyman: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Clare Clark: The Nature of Monsters
James Morrow: The Last Witchfinder
Michel Faber: Under the skin
Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why
Italo Calvino: If on a winter's night a traveller
T.C. Boyle: Tortilla Curtain
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
Naomi Alderman: The Power
Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens
Joshua Ferris: To rinse again at a suitable hour
Hari Kunzru: White Tears
Magnus Mills: The Scheme for Full Employment
Mick Jackson: Ten Sorry Tales
Jon McGregor: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Muriel Barbery: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Mitch Albom: The Five People you Meet in Heaven
Steve Toltz: A Fraction of the Whole

As you can see the titles cover a wide range of books, including non-fiction, historical fictionalisations, and a graphic novel, as well as the more usual reading group feedstock.