My turn

Ste Monique

Ooh, I've had a right job coming up with a selection of books for one of my book groups. My brief was 'A recent publication' and I was told that it had to be recently published in paperback.

I decided that I would look for books published in the last 4 months, told myself to avoid the Richard and Judy list and look for two novels and two non-fiction books. The group will then decide which of the four they want to read.

I wanted something that will provoke a lively discussion so checked reviews in The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian on line - I could have used The Independent too but I didn't want to devote even more time to the task and, well, to be honest, I could have just sat and read book reviews all week and still not been able to select only four that I would like to read.

There are an awful lot of novels out there and I found that I had to avoid a) anything that was part of a series b) anything that was too similar to something we had already read as a group c)anything that was more than 400 pages.

Yes, the length of the book has become quite important to me recently as I try to read Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook'. This is a novel of 576 pages, all of them in very small print and an old-fashioned typeface that isn't the easiest to read. I was delighted, therefore, to see that it is being dramatised on Radio 4 this week. I set myself to listen to part 2 last night and was sorely disappointed to discover that part 1 (which I missed) had only got as far as page 34! The end of part 2 took us to page 68. At this rate I may still be listening to the dramatisation in Janurary 2009! Still I will plough on. I'm already ahead of Radio 4, being on page 102 myself.

On my trawling through the book reviews I found an awful lot of books that are of similar formula. The most recent fashion seems to be for a novel relating to a 'traumatic' event in someone's childhood that has remained dormant in their memory for many years. Another event suddenly causes the main protagonist to delve into their past and they discover that they had been the catalyst for, or taken part in, some nastiness, usually involving the loss of a parent or sibling. I tried to avoid these too.

I found two novels I thought would be good to read and discuss with the group. 'Secrets of the Sea' by Nicholas Shakespeare and 'The Uncommon Reader' by Alan Bennett. I will say no more about them as you can look them up on Amazon should you be interested.

I turned to non-fiction, avoiding 'celebrity' biogs which all seem to be written by people who have been famous for about 15 minutes these days, and anything to do with travelling around or living in France, as all the members of the group are doing that right now. I finally came up with my choices, and there could have been so many more. Bill Bryson's 'Shakespeare: The World as a Stage', which received many good reviews over recent months, and Alison Light's 'Mrs Woolf and the Servants' which has also been well-received by the critics.

The trouble is, I want to read all four, and my list of 'must reads' is getting longer and longer - I still have a lovely pile of books sent to me recently by a friend that I need to avoid until after I've seen off Ms Lessing and I still want to read all the Richard and Judy Summer Reads (bar one). I also have two more books for book groups sitting around and another several that I have wanted to read for months.

It almost makes me wish for those long dark nights of winter. But not quite. The sun has returned this week and the temperatures are soaring back up to 30 degrees. Me and Ms Lessing will be found in a corner of the garden later today. I will finish it before the BBC!