I was born with a reading list I will never finish.
—Maud Casey
Book Salon
Here are the topics for my local book salon* to date. Each topic here includes a dozen representative books from the original lists of suggested books that were created to give people ideas about the possibilities for a given topic; however, participants are free to choose whatever book they believe fits the theme. The book salon concept was inspired by an early episode of Books on the Nightstand.
Lists for Salon Topics 1-10: Quests; Cherchez la femme!; Russian Roulette; Horror; Water, Water, Everywhere; Because Atheism Has No Holidays; Books and the Bookish; War, What Is It Good For?; Royals and Rulers; Crime and Punishment
Lists for Salon Topics 11-20: Best Picture Adaptations; Disturbing Dystopias; Around the World in 30 Books; What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew; Classic Boys Adventures; Go West, Young Man!; Food and Drink; We’ll Always Have Paris; Killer Thrillers; Out of Africa via a Passage to India
Lists for Salon Topics 21-30: The Streets of San Francisco; London Calling; Trips Down Memory Lane; Upstairs/Downstairs; Hard-Knock Lives; The Marriage Plots; Song of the South; Turning Japanese; Le Jazz Hot: Flappers, Feminists, Fitzgerald; Fractured Fairytales
Lists for Salon Topics 31-40: Classic Horror; American History X Libris; No Man Is an Island; From Russia with Love; (Auto)biography; Classic Literary Fan Fiction; Ghosts & Ghouls; A Hazy Shade of Winter; Trainspotting; 1 Picture = 1000 Words
Lists for Salon Topics 41-50: Witches Brew; Immigrants and Emigrants; The Art of the Possible; Just the Perfect Blendship; California Dreaming; Georgia On My Mind; Sex, Spies, But No Videotape; Cold Crime; Favorite Authors; Reading Lists
Lists for Salon Topics 51-: The Sisters Brothers
Current Reading Challenge: None
To see the challenges for 2010-2013, click here.
My Life in Books
For more on favorite and important books in my life, see this series of posts.
Lists of books we reread and books we can’t finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
—Russell Banks
*For those not familiar with this unusual book club concept, instead of reading and dissecting one book, as in a traditional book club, everyone selects whatever book they want that fits the theme of that session. We vote on topics, each of which is proposed with a list of 20-25 suggested books to give people an idea of what they might read for any given theme. No one forces anyone to read a particular book and, even if you don’t finish your book, you can participate in the discussion of the general theme and no one has to worry about spoiling a book for someone else. Finally, you hear about books that you might never have chosen for yourself, and often learning more about them in a specific context piques your curiosity.
