Blackwell reading group

Back when the world was young and I was working at Blackwell Publishers (before it was Blackwell Publishing or Wiley Inc.) we had the idea to start a reading group worthy of our significant intellectual pretentions and capacious appetites for alcohol.

To this end, and like the United Kingdom, we developed an unwritten constitution to distinguish us from other middlebrow Oxford literary societies. We decided to focus on not focusing, to meet regularly, and to snorkel our way through short books of all the genres and sub genres of literature. Soullessly munching through the Booker Prize shortlist was not for us.

In back-forming a list of our books I see that we have read literary fiction, chick-lit, philosophy, poetry, classics, women’s erotica, travel, adventure, crime and psychology. As time has passed we have become less drunk and less combative but hopefully more also usefully analytical.

Here are the titles we can remember
Madam Bovary, Simone de Beauvoir
Dirty Weekend, Helen Zahavi
Henry James, A Turn of the Screw
Michael Moore, Stupid White Men
J.M.Coetzee, Disgrace
Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Stories
Evelyn Waugh , Decline and Fall
Thor Heyerdahl, Kon Tiki
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
E.L.Doctorow, Ragtime
Flann O'Brien, At Swim Two Birds
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Christina Lamb, The Africa House
Bernard Schlink, The Reader
W.B.Yeats, The Tower
Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People
Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library
John Banville, The Sea
J.G.Ballard, The Drowned World
Ian McEwan, Saturday
Plato, The Symposium
Oliver James, They F**k You Up
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Magnus Mills, All Quiet on the Orient Express
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
Mick Brown, Spiritual Tourist
Joe Simpson, Touching the Void
Iain Banks, The Crow Road
J Lloyd and Rees, Come Together
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Tabitha Flyte, Coming round the mountain
Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence
James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Thomas More, Utopia
James Meek, The People's Act of Love
R.J. Ellory, A Quiet Belief in Angels
Val McDermid, The Mermaids Singing
John McGahern, The Dark
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail of '72

Forthcoming books are:
Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

September 2008

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale