The Booker Prize it is!

The consensus seems to be that we read something from the Booker Prize shortlist first, then move on to all putting forward a book with a 140 character review.  So...get thinking about the book you want to put forward next time!

For now...here is the poll for the Booker Prize list.  It'll be interesting to see how the votes go.  This article in the Guardian gives a nice feel for each book and this one features each author introducing their book.  Both would be a good place to start researching your choice.  Or will you be judging the books by their covers? Go, go, go - if you vote by Wednesday, I can announce our choice then.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Time for a new book

So...our current book is Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, which most people seem to be struggling with finishing! Instead of trying to soldier on, a discussion of it is scheduled in for Wednesday 18th of October.

That brings us to the end of our reading list of pre-selected books and we now need to pick what we read next!

I have an idea how this might work; each member picks a book and sells to us in 140 characters why we should read it. I can create a poll and we each cast 3 votes; 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices. We could then read the top 3 books in order.

 Another option is that we read the Booker Prize Winner, or we vote on which book to read from the shortlist. This approach saw us reading 'Room' around 2 years ago - a book some of you loved, some hated!

What do you think? Opinions required!

Sisters Brothers Discussion

One Day in September

The Books!

What follows are the books on the reading list from now until May whenever we finish.  I thought that having a list might give people an opportunity to plan ahead, look around for cheaper copies, maybe even read ahead if they want to. I plan to organise an 'in real life' bookclub discussion on the first book to see how that goes. It will follow the twitter discussion; any suggestions or advances, tweet or DM me at @booksaregood or comment below.

I also wanted to say something about new members! A few people follow the twitter group and aren't yet involved - if you are one of them and are thinking of joining in these discussions, then please do! Not many of us are frightening.

Soo....drumroll please!! The books are:

Book 1

'Nightmare Alley' by William Lindsay Gresham has been picked for us by @uragraymalkin. Discussion for this book will be on Wednesday 28th March at 9pm.

The other books are as follows. I've set provisional dates for these, but they can be moved if they clash with something else.

Book 2

'A Time of Gifts' by Paddy Leigh Fermor has been picked for us by @sharonmcg1971. Discussion for this book will be Tuesday May 15th.

Book 3

One Day in September, the story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre has been picked by @toykojazzpanda. Better trying to get this one used as it's out of print...from 40p on Amazon! Discussion for this book will take place in July.

Book 4

'The Sisters Brothers' by Patrick DeWitt was picked by @superemilyaah (and also suggested by @sharonmcg1971) will be discussed in August.

And finally...Book 5

'The Private Memoirs and Confessions Of A Justified Sinner - James Hogg has been picked by @booksaregood and we'll discuss this in September.

So....what do you think? Any you are particularly looking forward to? Would you have picked out any of these to read yourself? Comments to the usual place - tag them with #la1bc and/ or direct to @booksaregood

The Story So Far

I have been very lax in updating this blog. We've read three more books since Room, Bad Science and The Year of The Hare. 6 books in total!!

We have read and discussed:

• Last Rituals - Yrsa Sigurdardotti
• Anagrams - Lorrie Moore
• Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Turnout can vary - I recall very lively discussions of Anagrams & quieter but still very insightful discussion on the Jeanette Winterson book. I think we need to think about how we capture the discussions so we can look back on them - twitter has a habit of archiving things. If anyone is willing to summarise the discussions in the form of a review, let me know...

Rather than selecting a book using democratic means, I decided to speed things up a bit before Christmas by using a random name generator to pick one person to select a book for us to read. I like how that worked out, so we're going to do that again for the next 4 choices. That will mean that all active members will have picked a book by May/ June and we can all go back into the hat again. You never know, we may even have some new members!

I did mention that for discussion of the next book, we would have an In Real Life discussion. There's a nice, relatively large cafe in town full of sofas, books and amazing cake. If there is interest, I will ask them what they can do to host a little gathering (or maybe we could just #flashmobbookgroup?)

So...when the pickers have picked, I will let you know. Until then...check out this really lovely stop motion animation of a bookshop

The Year of the Hare

We had another good chat about a book this month, a really good choice I think. It's tricky to try and capture these twitter discussions. If you're interested in looking at the detail, you might like to use a good twitter search engine; twitter itself only searches back 10 days...

http://www.searchtastic.com/ does the job, just search for #La1bc

Otherwise, here's a wordle.