Barter Book Group – books read
We began Sept 03.
2022
January - May 2022
Theme: Other Worlds: Chilling (and Thrilling) Tales.
New Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
Home going by Yaa Gyasi
The Comedians by Graham Green
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Dare
The Black Jacobins by C. R. James
2021
September – December 2021 (Zoom)
Theme: CLI-FI
The High House by Jessie Greengrass;
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward;
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe;
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue;
The Shepherd's Life and Pastoral by James Rebanks;
January - May 2021 (on Zoom)
Theme: EMPIRE – How We Got To Where We Are (Zoom)
Essays: George Orwell;
Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor;
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe;
The Good Immigrant, ed Nikesh Shukla;
Part of Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad;
2020
September - December 2020 (Zoom)
Theme: Green and Black - Part 2
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge;
Climate Justice by Mary Robinson;
The Case for the New Green Deal by Anne Pettifor;
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo;
January - May 2020 (partly on Zoom)
On Kindness by Barbara Taylor (2009);
Theme: Green and Black - the Natural World ...
The Wild Places by Robert McFarlane (2008);
Harvest by Jim Crace
Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009) (Zoom);
(lockdown special):
The Code of the Woosters by P.G.Wodehouse (Zoom);
2019
September to December 2019
Theme: Molly's Sisters...
Longbourne by Jo Baker; Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris; Silence of Girls by Pat Barker; Orlando by Virginia Woolf
May 2019
Theme: Reaching Port.
Episode 17 (Ithaca) and 18 (Penelope) (150 pages in total)
April 2019
Theme: Mid-Ocean.
Episodes 10 (Wandering Rock) and 11 (Sirens) (100 pages in total) and, if you are up for more, 13 (Nausicaa) (50 pages)
March 2019
Theme: Setting sail.
Ulysses, Episode 1 (Telemachus) 2 (Nestor) 3 (Proteus) 4 (Calypso) 5 (Lotus Eaters) 6 (Hades) (150 pages in total)
February 2019
Theme: Ulysses, Planning our Voyage
January 2019
Theme: the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
2018
September – December 2018
Theme: the Long and the Short of it...
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales;
Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Raymond Queneau, 2013 and A World of Difference
January – May 2018
Theme: Beginnings and Endings
Muriel Spark, The Comforters; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
2017
September - December 2017
Theme: Great Ideas
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; Edward Gibbon, The Christians and the Fall of Rome; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; William Hazlitt, On the Pleasures of Hating
January - May 2017
Theme: Blue
Penelope Fitzgerald,The Blue Flower; Georges Simenon, The Blue Room; William Boyd, The Blue Afternoon; Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind:A memoir of moods and madness; Danielle Steele, Blue
January 2017 – Party Twelth Night Party (at Barter Books)
2016
January - May 2016
Theme: Comings and Goings / Between Two Places
Shaun Tan,The Arrival; Rose Tremaine, The Road Home; Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin; Sunjeer Sahota, The Year of the Runaways; Col Tóibín, Brooklyn
2015
September - December 2015
Theme: Rage against the Machine (Rebels with a Cause)
Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: Franz Kafka, The Castle: Loretta Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix
June 2015 – Party at The Hoolies, Alnmouth
January - May 2015
Theme: Old and New World Gold
Laurie Lee, As I walked out on a Midsummer Morning;Introduction to Spanish Poetry: A Dual-language Book editor: Eugenio Florit; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 years of Solitude; Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist; Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
January 2015 – Party - Howick Village hall Circle Dancing; reading that made an early impression on our lives
2014
September - December 2014
Theme: Russia
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov; Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Victor Pelevin, Babylon; Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine Diaries
June 2014 - Party Chinese takeaway and film Yellow Earth
January - June 2014
Theme: China
Peter Hessler, River Town - Two Years on the Yangtze; Dai Sijie,Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress; Jung Chang,Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China; 170 Chinese poems translated by Arthur Waley; Leslie Chang, Factory girls
January 2014 -Party - Dinner at Barter Books
2013
September-December 2013
Theme: Heroes and Tricksters
The Mahabharata, a shortened version by R.K. Narayan; and The Bhagavad Gita; Martin Bennett, West African Trickster Tales; Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur (part); Anthony Price, Other Paths to Glory.
June 2013 – Party - Ship Inn, Low Newton-by-the-Sea
January-May 2013
Theme: INDEPENDENCE: Who We Are … and What We Can Be?
Fitzroy Maclean (with Magnus Linklater), Scotland: a revised history; Kate Fox, Watching the English - the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Alan Watts, The book on the taboo against knowing who you are; Anne Tyler, Digging to America
January 2013 - Party - Howick Village Hall Dancing with Alistair Sinton
2012
September - December 2012
Theme: REVOLUTIONS and what it's like to live through them
George Eliot, Middlemarch; Mikhail Bulgakov,The White Guard; Ryszard Kapuscinski,Shah of Shahs; Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns
June 2012 – Party - Howick Village Hall Music. Singing with Sarah Gray
January - May 2012
Theme: COMING-OF-AGE (Bildungsroman) novels
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus; Bapsie Sidhwa, Ice-Candy Man; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea; Selma Lagerlof, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
January 2012 - Party
2011
September - December 2011
Theme: Ways of Seeing
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah; Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle; John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything
June 11 – Party
January – May 2011
Theme: Life and Work
Charles Dickens, Hard Times; John Lanchester, Whoops!:Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay; Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara; Polly Toynbee, Hard Work; The Gospel according to St Matthew.
January 2011 – Party - Barter Books – Seven Ages of Man(at Barter Books)
2010
September – December 2010
Theme: Journeys of Discovery
Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance; Salley Vickers, The Other Side of You; R.K Narayan, The English Teacher; Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence
June 2010 – Party at Poppy's house in Newcastle
January – May 2010
Theme: The Italians
Tim Parks, An Italian Education (1996, Guardian Books2001); March 1, 2: Dante, The Divine Comedy: Hell; Carlo Levi, Christ did not stop at Eboli; Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an author; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
January 2010 – Party - Barter Books – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (at Barter Books)
2009
September - December 2009
Theme: Mystery, or Deception
Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; John Banville, The Untouchables; Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead
June 2009 – Party - Barter Books – exploration/discovery (at Barter Books)
January - May 2009
Theme: Food
Nigel Slater, Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table; Julia Child, My Life in France; Bill Buford, Heat; John Lanchester, My Debt to Pleasure; Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain
January 2009 – Party - Barter Books – trains (at Barter Books)
2008
September - December 2008
Theme: Contemporary world writing
Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin; Uwem Akpan, Say You're One of Them; Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Marina Lewycka,Two Caravans
January - May 2008
Theme: French literature
Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Proust Swann's Way (vol 1 of 'In Search of Lost Time'); St Exupery Le Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) and Southern Mail; Albert Camus, The Stranger; Irene Nemirovksy, Suite Francaise (French Suite)
2007
September - December 2007
Theme: Diaries/ memoirs
Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives; James Boswell, Boswell's life of Johnson; Isabella Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains; Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower
January - May 07
Theme: Lucky Dip
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; David Malouf, The Great World; Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard; Khalid Hosseini, The Kite Runner
2006
September - December 2006
Theme: The Arab World
Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazard – My Time governing in Iraq ; Amin Ma’alouf, the Crusades through Arab Eyes; 1001 Nights; Karen Armstrong, A short history of Islam
January - May 2006
Theme: American literature
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Henry James, Selected short stories; Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
2005
September - December 2005
Theme: Travel books
H.V. Morton, Travels through Bible Lands; Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar; Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium; Homer, Odyssey
January - May 2005
Theme: Five women’s books linked to experiences of childhood or adolescence
Julia Darling, The Taxi-Driver’s daughter; Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye; Sally Morgan, My Place; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
2004
September - December 2004
Theme: Light and Dark
Nick Hornby, How to Be Good; Tolstoy, Resurrection; Philip Pulman, His Dark Materials; Gawain and the Green Knight
January - May 2004
Theme: War
Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen; Ivo Andric, The Bridge over the Drina; Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk; Homer, The Iliad; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
2003
September - December 2003
Theme: Colliding Cultures
Graham Greene, The Quiet American; Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red