It’s a perfect time of year to celebrate your group and all the books you read and talk about together – 28th September is National Reading Group Day! If you benefit from belonging to a reading group, why not spread the joy and invite someone new along to your meeting this month? Or you could encourage friends to start a new group. Your local library will be happy to help with this – there is information online, or drop in and speak to staff. Take a look at The Reading Agency for more ways to celebrate and enhance your group’s reading adventures.

As current reading group members will be aware, we charge a £35 annual fee, so what are the benefits of being a reading group member?

• Reading groups can borrow items for six weeks rather than three, giving members longer to read before they need to return or renew.
• Reading groups can place up to twelve reservations a month.
• Library staff will order your books as a set, for you to then collect.
• Library staff can provide advice and guidance about the availability of titles, or suggest titles, new authors, and genres for your group.
• Library staff can search for and recommend alternative formats for a title – Large Print, Spoken Word CDs, eBook or eAudiobooks.
• You receive a quarterly newsletter, full of information just for reading groups.
• Libraries can offer spaces for your group to meet up.

The annual fee enables us to keep reinvesting in buying new reading group sets, ensuring that we have enough copies, and that the collection remains current and of good quality. It also contributes to the cost of transporting the books around the county for you to collect from your chosen library.

We hope you’ll agree, the reading group subscription is great value!

Abbeyfield Book Club, Girton Green By Jillinda Tiley & Helen Wickam

Our group started in 2016/17 in the Abbeyfield independent living complex. To incorporate this community into the village of Girton, the complex offers communal areas and activities to outside visitors - I am one of these. I learnt a lot of my bridge from the bridge club before Covid! We were asked to think of other activities the residents might enjoy and I suggested a book club. So we began!

Apart from me, members are Abbeyfield residents, usually between 6 and 10, meeting monthly.

As most residents have had to downsize and prune their existing libraries, it is a bonus to be able to borrow books from the public library. There are few books which everyone has enjoyed - but tastes differ! Most enjoyed:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark – wonderful writing and a theme many of us shared.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – good for discussion and full of insight.

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain – carefully crafted and meaningful to a pensioner generation.

Alexander McCall Smith is also popular. We have some ex-Edinburgh residents and some with experience of East Africa.

Being in the group allows us – and new residents - to socialise, share experiences and sharpen our critical faculties!

The choice of book depends on availability. If the book is really not liked it is sometimes left unfinished, but nobody minds, there are no sanctions! The size of book and print size are important - too big or too heavy are not helpful! Since joining I’ve read many books I had never heard of, and enjoyed most. Listening to others’ comments, I have usually come away with new insight.