Bookclub Selection

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.