Our book club

Lello bookshop, Porto, Portugal
This is so stunning, it looks like it belongs in Hogwarts!!

As I know many of you are avid readers like myself,  I thought I'd tell you a bit about our book club & how we choose our books.

We're a group of friends roughly the same age & we all either live in the village or have children at the village school.  It was started up about 4 years ago I think but I've only been going for about 3 years after talking to a mum at nursery one day about reading & she mentioned about coming along to their next BC which was to be held the following evening.

There are about 10 of us who go regularly & other members who come along as & when they can.  We meet once a month at each other's houses, each taking turns & the host house provides the all important snacks, wine & cake!

In January when the meeting was at my house, we decided to change the way we chose our books as a lot of people felt that their choices were never being picked due to the more vociferous members of our group getting theirs chosen all the time.  So we decided that for each month, we would have a genre & we would all bring along a suggestion for that specific genre.  These are anonymous suggestions that are written on a piece of paper & put into a 'hat' & one is pulled at random - this is the book we then read.  By doing it this way, everyone gets an equal chance of having their book chosen & we get to read some brilliant books - books we'd otherwise never have chosen!

This is our genre list for this year & what we've read so far:

January - Pot Luck
  The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

February - Romance
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

March - Fantasy
Kingdom of shadows by Barbara Erskine

April - Pot luck
Room by Emma Donoghue

May - Auto/biography
Do No Harm by Dr Henry Marsh

June - Classic
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

July - Crime/thriller
Along Came a Spider by James Patterson

August - Pot luck
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

September - History/historical fiction
 Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

October - Sci-fi
 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

November - Travel
 A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

December - Pot luck
tbc but is usually a 'lighter' Christmassy read!

I really enjoy my BC nights & have discovered some fabulous reads that I'd never have chosen myself in a million years as I tend to stick to psychological/crime thrillers, so it pushes me waaayyy out of my comfort zone.  And let's face it, it's also a great excuse for a catch-up with my friends!!

Is anyone else in a book club?  What are your favourite books, I'm always looking for new suggestions?!

Bad blogger alert!

I've been seriously neglecting my blog for the last couple of weeks, my bad!! In my defence, I've had such a chock-full fortnight starting with a 5 day visit from the in-laws so we were out & about during the days. 

Then a couple of weeks back, myself & 2 other mums from my son's primary school were asked by the new headteacher if we would be up for the challenge of starting a new library for the school.  I have to admit, as a complete & utter bookworm, this really, really pleased me as I believe it's so important for ALL schools to encourage reading & provide a library of sorts, no matter what size.

So over the space of 4 days last week, we sifted through around 3000 old scabby books that the school had in storage & have got rid of three quarters of them.  We've now got to go on a Junior Librarian course to learn how to catalogue & arrange new books & to train up some of the Primary 7s to be Junior Librarians.  We've got a budget to decorate 2 new rooms for the new library & then buy a heap of new books & we've got to do some serious fundraising too!

We went on tours of some local schools to see what they've done with their libraries & have got some amazing ideas what to do now.  So it's going to be a really busy few months ahead of us but I'm so excited & I haven't been so riled up about a project for years!! 

But annoyingly yesterday, my phone completely died a death & guess who hadn't downloaded all my photos & blog drafts??? So I promise I'll get back on it soon but I need to re-take a LOT of blog photos & I'll be spending an awful lot of time at the school every day.........but I WILL get back on form soon!!

Toodles!