Brown Velvet of Days Gone By

The Brown Velvet Book Group was born late in 2010.  We first met on December 19th of that year (at my house!) and originally we had two other members, making for ten total (those two both withdrew within a few months).  We've been the same eight for more than two years.  Between then and now, we have read 25 books, at around the rate of one every month to a month and a half.  In the beginning we picked the books by some sort of consensus: people would come to BVBG with suggestions, we would debate them, and then we would settle on something.  After reading a bunch of bad books by people we had read previously and loved, we decided to try a different way: each member would have the ability to choose a book that s/he was invested in and the rest of us would read it. I'm not sure that this system has resulted in fewer bad books (see the previous entry on The Astronaut Wives' Club), but it has streamlined our selection process.   Throughout we have cooked to the theme of the book, if there was one discernible.  Looking back over the list, some are more memorable than others.  Whoever picks the book is also the host.

Without further ado, I give you the previous 24 books (well, 23 books and 2 plays, which we combined for one meeting):

Patti Smith, Just Kids

Jennifer Gilmore, Something Red

Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone

Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis

Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House and Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

It was after reading Wolitzer, Perrotta, and Eugenides, authors many of us had previously enjoyed, that we decided to switch the selection process.  (We all pretty much hated The Uncoupling, The Leftovers, and The Marriage Plot.)  From then on we have moved alphabetically through the group (though we sometimes switch it up, as we did the first time, if the next in line can't host and needs to postpone her/his selection): 

Justin Cronin, The Passage

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

Lauren Groff, Arcadia

Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret

Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts

Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

George Saunders, Tenth of December

Mary McCarthy, The Group

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements