Can you come up with some book club "themes" please?

[Flamesparrow]

Have joined my mum's book club and she says they struggle with themes for what to read the next month (they all read a book in the theme rather than the same book iyswim).

They have done Bond and "Children's" (children's was a list from a book group suggestion book), horror, "quirky" (Join Me, Yes Man, Danny Yates Must Die, Hitchhikers... I know that list because they borrowed most from me )they have done others too but I can't think what! I feel like I want to kick them to read a bit of fantasy, but they are all very reluctant about the unknown

Suggestions very much welcomed!

Crime fiction. Historical. Chick lit. Victorian classics. Gothic fiction. Satire. Post-colonial literature.

I'm an English teacher and at the moment we're each reading one of the Booker shortlist for a discussion on Monday before the prize is announced, so something similar - perhaps recent Booker winners (and then discuss their worthiness or not)? Then the same can be done with the Orange prize for fiction and so on.

Hope there's some ideas in that lot!

Do you mean themes as in genres or as in a topic? If the latter, my bookgroup at home has a theme night at Xmas. You could go for colours, food, travel, history, animals...um...that's all for now! Hth.

Ooh lots of ideas

Genres or topics Suedonim. I like the idea of something like colours - it gives a much wider variety of things doesn't it?

Biography - our group did this once, random biogs from the library. I got Michael Bentine
Or pick an author eg Daphne Du Maurier
Or based on geography eg India, South America

Gothic fiction is a good autumn one (the right weather for it!) and gives a huge variety because you can go from absolute classics like Frankenstein, Dracula and The Monk to much more modern stuff like The Woman in Black and The Wasp Factory. It also means people who have less time to read can go for something short like Jekyll and Hyde or Poe's short stories.

I like the geography idea, Chippy - how about novels by, say, Chinese or Indian or African writers?

American Literature!

I really will shut up now

You are loooooooooovely

I'm going to print off this thread and take it with me!!

The American Dream? You could start with Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath.