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Warning, blowing of own trumpet follows.
My book club is having a party to celebrate its 10th anniversary this week and I thought that a book club party should have lots of book type decorations so I offered to make some bunting with pictures of the covers of the books we’ve read over the last ten years.
It took a lot longer than I rather hopefully thought it would, it can be quite difficult finding decent pictures of the covers on the internet, I had to give up on Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate as all the images were desperately blurred, but I have to say I think I did a jolly good job.
Here they are hung up in my husband’s office so I can admire my handiwork. They really do look even better in real life.
There’s a total of 79 covers up there, we’ve actually read 98 books but I couldn’t download some, I loathed a couple so much I refused to include them (the creator’s privilege), some of the covers were downright boring and I accidentally cut Atonement in half. I have included the book club’s most loathed book – Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott which prompted one member to threaten to resign if we ever had a book like that again.
The Eyre Affair was not a success, one member said, ‘It’s got a Dodo in it and Dodos don’t exist…’
Moon Tiger had a very mixed reception as did Lucia, Lucia but everyone loved The Next Step In The Dance. Great cover too.
This one is for the door as everyone comes in. The middle two books, The Girl With A Pearl Earring was the first book we read, and Guernica was our book last week.
Now off to make book related place cards for the lunch…
Victoria Corby 
What a great idea! Happy Birthday to your book club. Thanks for reminding me never to read Ivanhoe…
I gather there’s an abridged version just out. That should be a definite improvement.
Perhaps you could make a little video clip, so we can see them all, love the idea!
I’m not sure that a video clip wouldn’t be pandering to my own vanity a little too much.
love this!
Thanks, as you might have noticed I’m quite unabashedly holding it up for admiraation!
That’s such a cool idea! What a great, long-term group to have stuck together 🙂 I love the decorations, and hope the party is a blast, to!
Thanks for the comment. We’re not doing badly as a group – we’ve still got 6 of the 10 original members and three of those left because they moved.
Great bunting Victoria – I’m impressed. We’re not that imaginative in our book club!
Thanks, I had great fun doing it.
This may be a silly question but how did you end up getting your book group together? We’re considering one in Manchester and I’m wondering, since my friends aren’t massively bookish and I’ve now left university what the best way of going about it is. Or did everyone you knew love books as much as you? (Fabulous bunting btw)
Mary, our founder, who has been a member of lots of book clubs, couldn’t find one when she moved here so she started contacting people she knew whom she thought might be interested. It was a bit like ripples, the ones who were keen then contacted others who might be interested. She based the guidelines on a book group she’d belonged to in Paris, we read fiction almost exclusively (discussions of biographies can get very polarised by whether or not you personally approve of the person written about), no short stories – the discussion gets too fragmented, each member in turn chooses a book which she must have read and leads the discussion about it and that if the majority of the group really doesn’t want to read a book another must be chosen. That’s a tricky one as people can take offence if you don’t “like” their book but it isn’t a comment on them, just that several people really don’t like that author.
Other less formal rules are that we don’t recommend chunksters unless it’s to read over the summer, that unless we’re away or ill we do come to all the meetings and that we read the books. Or at least try to, explaining why they’ve been abandoned is fine.
Several of the group aren’t very bookish but come because they like being prompted to do something they wouldn’t otherwise.