We have a book club meeting most months on a Wednesday evening. The book club reads mainly reads non-fiction books. You don't have to read the whole book but it is useful to to have read a chapter that you have found interesting and want to talk about. We usually look at other books, films, music, objects that are connected to the subject as a way of opening up the ideas in the book to have a more lively conversation. This is why it's also possible to come to the book club without having read the book. We sell the book in the shop and there is a copy to borrow in the reading library. The book club is free but if you buy the book you support the bookshop - and the authors and publishers. I usually make some soup which we eat first (around 6.45pm). Then the book club runs between 7pm - 8pm. There are a few regulars but new people come each time. It's usually fun and interesting and the group can decide what books they want to read. You don't have to be a 'reader' to come.

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Bring Your Own Book!
Wednesday 18th September 
6.45pm for soup, 7pm start

This month's book club is being handed over to you! Bring along some suggestions of books we could read at our future monthly meets. We are using this meet as an opportunity to change up the books we read at book club and get some new recommendations ! Please come along early for a warm bowl of soup, otherwise we begin at 7pm.

 

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Book Club: The Seaside
Englands Love Affair.
By Madeline Bunting
Wednesday 21st August
6.45pm Soup, 7pm Book Club

 

Travelling along England’s coast, Madeline bunting explores resorts and seaside towns that have helped shaped the nations identity. Furthermore she investigates how these places of “pleasure, entertainment, fantasy and adventure” have fallen into neglect.  A vivid journey around England's great seaside resorts, exploring their history and current struggle.

This month’s book club is sponsored by Walton Beach Holiday Lets, three stylish properties to hire in Walton on the Naze.  We have 8 copies of the book to give to book club readers for free. Book £10.99

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Book Club: Wasteland
The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters.
By Oliver Franklin Wallis
Wednesday 17th July
6.45pm Soup, 7pm Book Club

 

Waste is everywhere. It’s clogging our rivers and littering our streets. The Pacific Ocean contains a great garbage patch three times the size of France. Our junk is even orbiting the earth. No wonder there are microplastics in our bloodstreams. From the landfills of New Delhi, to the second-hand clothing markets of Ghana and the overflowing sewers of Britain, join Oliver Franklin-Wallis as he reveals the dirty truth about the global waste industry. Book £10.99 available at The Nose from Saturday.

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The Accidental Detectorist:
Uncovering an Underground Obsession.
By Nigel Richardson, 2022.
Wednesday 5th June
6.45pm Soup, 7pm Book Club.

When a travel writer is stuck on home soil in the middle of a pandemic he tries his hand at metal detecting - and is instantly addicted. This all-consuming hobby takes him around the country, back through history.

Book price £10.99

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Book Club: Essex Clay by Andrew Motion
6.45pm Soup, 7pm Book Club
Free, all welcome
Book Club Price, £9.99

 

This month we are reading the long form poem Essex Clay by Andrew Motion. It is personal account about loss, memory, and retrieval: a verse memoir of the former Poet Laureate, revisiting the subjects that have defined his writing life. Through his careful reflections, the poet has been conscious of the flinty Essex clay as a primeval force lurking below the mechanical world of the buses and cars which transport him as a young 17-year old boy during the days after this mothers riding accident. 

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Book Club: Rings of Saturn by W.G.Sebald
Wednesday 28th February 2024.
Soup 6.45pm, 7pm Book Club

Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, The Rings of Saturn was called "a hybrid of a book – fiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir"

What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald’s own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, to fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms, the result is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human.

 

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Book Club: The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
Wednesday 24 January 2024.
Soup 6.45pm, 7pm Book Club

The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.

The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.

Weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, and charting acts of civil disobedience that challenge orthodox power at its heart, The Book of Trespass will transform the way you see the land.

Book Club: Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen
Wednesday 22 November, Soup 6.45pm, Book club 7pm -8pm

For the November book club we are reading ‘Small Fires, An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson. In this innovative memoir, Rebecca May Johnson rewrites the kitchen as a vital source of knowledge and revelation. Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, she explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe; the power of small fires burning everywhere.

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