book club

A friend and I started a little book club across the miles - she's in Australia and I am...well, here obviously. My friend suggested this idea as a way of discussing interesting topics, and to spurn us to look deeper into ourselves and the world around us.

We have been doing this for about a year now, and I must say, I have never read so many books in one year as I have this year. And that includes my first, misguided year at uni, when I had grand illusions of studying to become a writer, and signed up to do English and classical studies at once - each subject requiring one read a book a week - IMPOSSIBLE - I also had philosophy/medieval history and french, plus the million actual assignments to research and write.

The first book we were required to read for Classics was The Iliad and for English...Jane Eyre, both were fine books, but neither were exactly short...and all those Greek names to remember in The Iliad - my brain almost fried that first week. Thankfully the Classics professor gave us a few more weeks for the first two books (the second was "The Odyssey"). I think I did manage to read all on the Classical Studies required reading list...I can't say the same about English. I believe I still have my copy of The Watch Tower (the novel, not the Jehovah's Witness magazine). It is still in its original, straight off the Unibooks shelf, pristine, not a dog ear or underlined sentence in sight - condition; and I have had it 10 years now!

It is funny that I was never a reader as a child. I never found a book I clicked with, and I was always a dreadfully slow reader - so slow that I was placed with all the kids who had trouble reading. My problem was not that I couldn't read, but that I found no joy in it and so I just ...well, didn't.

I started connecting more with books when I was given a book to read by my husband who was raving about it. It was within the genre of your classic quest type story, but wrapped around some metaphysical and mystical themes and ideas. I was very sceptical about it at first.

Ashley had gone away to work for a couple of weeks and had left the book on the chest of drawers on the other side of the room. It was 1 am in the morning, I had laboured along with the blasted Iliad all day, but I was having trouble winding down. I had easily resisted the book since Ashely's departure, despite his urging for me to read it so we could discuss it.

I remember it was shining out at me as I lay there tossing and turning, practically bludgeoning me with its own front cover, calling me to read it. So I did. I picked it up in a resigned mocking fashion - as if to say, "what is this crap about". Well, by page 9 I was hooked. The book spoke about "restlessness"...boy did I know that feeling. It had been something I had been battling for a number of years. The book applied meaning to it, and so I allowed myself to be carried along with the current of that fictional story.... I guess my soul has been opened to the magical potential of a story ever since.

The love of books and the written word, stories and possibility is definitely something I want to pass onto my children. And while they have a lot of books between them, we also go to the library every couple of weeks and check out 20 picture books at a time, which are read to them before the light goes out each night. I think I enjoy this ritual of the bedtime routine just as much as they do.

For myself, I tend to have a few books on the go. I tend to read a fictional novel and a spiritual wisdom book at the same time. The interesting thing about sharing a book with a friend is that we take turns selecting the book we are going to read, and so I have been reading some books that I would normally not consider - such as the one we just finished - Shantaram - 950 pages. As a slow reader I feel such a book to be an achievement. The language of that book was really quite glorious, and the story, for the most part, was really quite astonishing- unfortunately the ending was not as rewarding as the idea of getting through the whole 950 pages, but it was still worth the read.

It was my turn to chose our next book. I love going into book stores to see which one wants to be read by me - I chose Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper . I have never read anything by that author before, so it should be an interesting experiment.

Does anyone have any recommendations?