camberwell book club 2004 - 2013

First I have to show you this brilliant knitted Beegu, based on the character in the fab book by Alexis Deacon: It's knitted by Alice Brewer, and if you don't know Beegu, there's a nice video interpretation by Matt Glover. Here's Alice showing off her Beegu in our book club meeting. Her daughter Juniper is rather obsessed and dressed up as Beegu for World Book Day. And here's our book club. A happy scene, but also sad because it was our last meeting of book club, after meeting for nine years and reading lots of books together. People were busy, had moved away and it was getting harder and harder to get a decent-sized group. But almost everyone (who hadn't moved to New Zealand or gone off to school elsewhere) rallied for the last meeting. Franklyn Johnson, Maureen Prince, Heather Kilgour, Fiona Wells, Emma Edwards, Alice Brewer, Dan Brewer, Nicole Young, Stuart Pyle, Nick Prince, Anneli, Juniper and Myla (named after the author of one of the books we read) Here's our lovely host, Fiona Wells, who looked after us so well and baked amazing cakes. I think we had a pretty good model for book club. We took turns choosing the book; when it was one person's turn, they'd pick three books, and whoever was at the meeting would vote for one of the three books to read. Sometimes we'd play Ex Libris, which is this great game where you have to make up a beginning or ending for a famous book and try to trick everyone into thinking it's the real one. (I once posted some examples here.) For the last meeting, we didn't discuss a new book, but went back through the list of books we read, reminisced about them and decided on which ones were our favourites and which were the hilarious stinkers. I'll attach the list of books here, partly just to remember them myself. I'm going to miss book club. It was a great way of seeing these friends and I hope we all stay in touch. Camberwell Book Club 2004 - 2013, starting from our most recently read books: Cutting For Stone - Abraham Verghese Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian The Carhullan Army - Sarah Hall Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins All Fall Down - Sally Nicholls Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd Cannery Row - John Steinbeck The Help - Kathryn Stockett Into the Storm - Taylor Anderson Random Acts of Heroic Love - Danny Scheinmann Vainglory - Geraldine McCaughrean Alone in Berlin - Hans Falada The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney Disgrace - J.M.Coetze Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Road - Cormac McCarthy Bee Season - Myla Goldberg The Worst Date Ever - Jane Bussmann Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven - Jane Bailey Small Island - Andrea Levy Empress Orchid - Anchee Min The Road Home - Rose Tremain Boy A - Jonathan Tregill To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis Tuesday's War - David Fiddimore The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie The Pure in Heart - Susan Hill The Bookseller of Kabul - Åsne Seierstad Skellig - David Almond The Interpretation of Murder - Jed Rubenfeld The Secret River - Kate Grenville Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Townsend A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult American Pastoral - Philip Roth Romanitas - Sophia McDougall The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini These is My Words: the diary of Sarah Agnes Pryne - Nancy Turner Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe Agnes Grey - Anne Bronte The Women's Room - Marilyn French Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon The Shipping News - Annie Proulx