Anyway

The book­club I belong to picked the books for the 2004–5 sea­son. It went a lot quicker this year than last because two of the men had to rush off to their hockey game. We seem to have a some­what unusual book­club, in that there are men and women, and we try to read a wide selec­tion of types of books — some old, some new, and occa­sion­ally non-fiction. We mostly try for books that indi­vidu­als might not read without some incent­ive, or books that look like they’d lead to inter­est­ing discussions.

The basic pro­cess is that every­one brings 3 books which are all avail­able in paper­back, and that cover a range of styles and top­ics. Every­one presents the books they brought, say­ing why they chose them.
We ask for vetoes (on any reas­on­able ground) and then every­one gets 5 votes. The books with the highest num­ber of votes win — except we do check to make sure we cover a range of top­ics, and not all the books are thick or dif­fi­cult to read.

This year’s list is
Palace Walk (Cairo Tri­logy) — Naguib Mah­fouz
Sol­aris — Stan­islaw Lem
Lamb: The Gos­pel Accord­ing to Biff, Christ’s Child­hood Pal — Chris­topher Moore
The Dante Club: A Novel — Mat­thew Pearl
Being There — Jerzy Kos­in­ski
Emo­tion­ally Weird: A Novel — Kate Atkin­son
The Stranger — Albert Camus

I’ll blog com­ments on the books as we read them. The order the books are given in is the order we expect to read them in and you never know, we might even stick to it.