Our Recommended reads from Bring Your Own Book club

Every month a group of us get together and talk about the books that we have been reading over the previous month. Bring Your Own book club was started in the first lockdown and has brought people together from all over Southampton and beyond (we have had people from as far afield as Manchester come along). Unlike your traditional bookclub we don’t all read the same book but each member of the group talks about their favourite read (or reads), sharing a bit about the story, their inspirations for reading the book or how the book has made them feel or changed their way of thinking. We all nearly always come away with another book to add to our must read lists.

We’d like to share with you some of the recommended reads from our book club members. We hope they inspire you to.

Joan Orme, one of the first members of BYOB and part of October Books Community Engagement Working Group (CEWG), recommended The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes and talked about the connections and threads that link the two books together.

This led us on to discuss Circe by Madeline Miller, a retelling of the story of this character from Greek legend, and a great book to help piece all the Greek myths together. Madeline has also written The Song of Achilles. 

New BYOB member James Gavin had been reading Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, gritty realism from north of the border. Joan shared her thoughts about the book too as she has lived and worked in Glasgow, where the book is set, for a number of years.

Rosie Cooper, who is also a long term BYOB member and CEWG participant as well as helping with our MushRoom events, was dipping into The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden, a perfect book for spring. In our conversation around this book James also recommended Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who changed the World.

Clare Diaper had taken a step outside her usual genres of nature writing and walking and had picked a sci-fi novel as her book for the month. She had found The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin both inspiring and very relevant to our times.

We ended our BYOB session with Richard Cervantes, another long term BYOB member and CEWG participant, talking about The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. This story of nineteen year old Armanoush, who travels secretly to Istanbul from America to search for her Armenian roots, is both informative and inspiring.

We hope that you have enjoyed our recommended reads and that we might see you at our next BYOB club gathering which is on the 25th May at 7pm. This will be a hybrid event, with both online and in person gathering. 

Inspired order your copies today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop.org store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.

We’ll be closed this Monday 3rd May for the May Day Bank Holiday! 

Then we’ll be back to our our normal open hours of:

Monday - Saturday

10am - 4pm

We are back open six days a week, with the whole store open for browsing. We will still of course be taking customer orders and you will still be able to buy food and cleaning products online through our online store. 

We are able to be open 6 days a week again because of your consideration and care whilst in the shop. Keep doing what you’re doing and leave that extra space, sanitise those hands and pull on that mask. We know you’re smiling underneath it :) 

You will see we have a QR code at the door, if you have the NHS COVID-19 app downloaded to your smart phone please scan this as you enter the shop.