Splinter

I have had a few goes at sustaining membership of a Book Group.  My best success was remaining part of a group of residents of Godalming and surrounding villages over a period of six years.  We started in October 2004 and one of our number maintained a list of our reads up to a point......

BOOK GROUP (from October ‘04)

Middlesex – Jeffrey Euginides

Regeneration – Pat Barker

An Instance at the Fingerpost – Ian Pears

Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingslover

The Trumpet Major – Thomas Hardy

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Reuz  Zofon

Persuasion – Jane Austen

Silk – Alessandro Baricco

Small Island – Andrea Levy

And Quiet Flows the Don –Sholokhov

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein

Plainsong – Kent Haruf

A  Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian – Marina Lewycka

The Sea House – Esther Freud

The Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi

The Sea – John Banville

The Fall – Simon Mawer

The Colour – Rose Tremain

The Accidental – Ali Smith

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

The Night Watch – Sarah Waters

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Two Lives – Vickram Seth

Restless – William Boyd

To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Spies – Michael Frayn

Catcher in the Rye – Salinger

An Interpretation of Murder – Jed Rubenfeld

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

The Weekend in September – R.C. Sherrif

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell

The Other Side of the Bridge – Mary Lawson

The House of Orphans – Helen Dunmore

A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon

Salmon Fishing on the Yemen – Paul Torday

Mr. Pip – Lloyd James

On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

Possession – A.S.Byatt

What was Lost – Catherine O’Flynn

The House of Stone – Christina Lamb

Resistance – Owen Shears

Engleby – Sebastian Faulks

The Gathering – Anne Enright

Notes on an Exhibition – Patrick Gale

Stuart – A Life Backwards – Alexander Masters

The Welsh Girl – Peter Ho Davies

A House by the Thames – Gillian Tindall

Bad Science – Ben Goldacre

These Foolish Things – Deborah Moggach

Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Here we are at the end of the world – Lloyd James

The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry

The White Tiger – Aravind

The Namesake – Jhumpo Lahiri

The Outcast – Sadie Jones

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

The Behaviour of Moths – Poppy Adams

American Pastoral – Philip Roth

The Lieutenant – Kate Grenville

The Mysteries of Glass – Sue Gee

Catch 22 – Joseph Hillier

Water for Elephants – Sarah Gruen

The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell

Sex and Stravinsky – Barbara Trapido

The Hare with Amber Eyes – Edmund de Waal

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell

Trespass – Rose Tremain

The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Evelyn Waugh

Homer and Langley – E.L. Doctorow

The Painted Veil – Somerset Maughan

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Snowdrops – A.D. Miller

Cutting For Stone – Abraham Vergese

Pure – Andrew Miller

The Saffron Kitchen – Yasmin Crowther

Mosquito – Roma Tearne

Painter of Silence – Georgina Harding

Song of Achilles – Madeleine Miller

A Woman in Berlin - Anon

The Garden of Evening Mists – Tan Twan Eng

This list is incomplete which is a pity. The compiler failed to keep track and I think there must be at least a dozen titles which have never made it onto the list.  Then, within a relatively short period of time several of us moved away.  I continued to drive from my Dorset home to Godalming to participate.  This was helped by the fact that my daughter now owned and lived in our family home.  A bout of illness disrupted my pilgrimages and the Book Group slowly disbanded.  Someone in the village to which I moved had not long started a book group locally when we moved to the village in September 2010.  Organised rather differently from my Surrey one (where we met in the evening with wine and nibbles and reasonably regular intervals of four to six weeks) the Winterborne K group met on the second Tuesday of the month at 4 p.m.  We chose books from a list provided by the Wareham library.  The ethos was different in many ways and I slowly lost my enthusiasm. 

But others from the WK group were beginning to feel a bit disenchanted with the rather limiting and lack-lustre choices offered in the library Book Groups catalogue.  Today four of us ate lunch round my table and we talked about the books we would like to read and how we might organise ourselves.  We will choose a day at regular but not fixed intervals, we will take it in turns to host a soup and cheese lunch, we may choose one or two books that we would all like to read, and we will bring and talk about other titles.  It will be all about the love of books and reading. 

So if it all works out, at our next get-together we will talk about our set book, Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel Night School. Other titles in the frame for optional reading and discussion are Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters and Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. 

So where does Splinter come in?  That is what we will call ourselves!