Watch your community grow with book
discussion groups and book group kits
Porirua Library Bookclub
Sylvia Carlyle, BA (VUW), Dip.NZLS, MA (London)
I started the bookclub after attending a Libraries Alive course in 2009. I had always
thought that public libraries were one of the best things on God’s green earth, but
both that course and completing Jane George’s MIS paper on Reader Advisory
Services at Victoria University in 2010, re-ignited my passion for being a librarian
and what we can do for our users.
Useful resources:
Bethan M Hughes.. Sharing the buzz : guidelines for reading groups (Welsh Books
Council, 2005). It may be found as a pdf file on http://www.cllc.org.uk/ymgyrchoeddcampaigns/reading-darllen
Reading groups for everyone is part of the UK’s The Reading Agency. Lots of useful
information and ideas including reviews from individual reading groups.
http://readinggroups.org/
Fiction_L: You don’t have to subscribe to this discussion board, but it can be
worthwhile doing so. American, and aimed at fiction readers advisory, it’s full of
wonderful stuff. Lots of ‘my patron can’t remember the title or author but it had a blue
balloon on the cover’ type questions, but reading groups come up frequently as a
sub-set of RA. http://www.mgpl.org/read-listen-view/fl/flmenu/
Titles, authors and themes (read by the bookclub since 2009).
Titles
Marcus Zusak. The Book Thief
Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows. The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie
Society
Daniel Defoe. Moll Flanders
Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford
Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood bible
Alison Wong. When the earth turns silver
Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huck Finn
Peter Walker. The Fox Boy
George Eliot. Middlemarch
David Mitchell. The Thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Ann Tyler. Digging to America
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped
Kate Atkinson. Life after Life
Terry Pratchett. Monstrous Regiment
Jane Austen. Pride & prejudice, and Jo Baker. Longbourn (Summer read 2014-15)
Authors
Chris Bohjalian
Deborah Moggach
Paul Auster
Toni Morrison
Graham Greene
Carol Shields
Neville Shute
Alice Walker
China Mieville
Danielle Steele
Colm Toibin
Charlotte Grimshaw
Tim Winton
Iris Murdoch
Haruki Murakami
Doris Lessing
Themes
Memoirs of childhood
Graphic books
Orange Prize winners
Dewey Number lucky dip
The epistolary novel
Novels of ancient Rome
Novels based on or inspired by fairy and folk tales
Novels set on the beach, shore or coast (emphasis on NZ)
NZ high country and homestead life – novels and memoirs
Novels of the American west and pioneer life
Favourite reads from our 20s, that we haven’t read since
New Zealand history in the novel
Audio Books
The essay - from Montaigne to Kingsolver (and beyond)
Re-reading our favourite book of childhood
The movie or the book – read the book then watch the film
The Carnegie Medal Award: reading two books, one from 1936-1955 and one from
1993-2013
Novels of women’s experience of WWI
Contact: scarlyle@pcc.govt.nz
September 2014