Forthcoming Events
- IoI Forum
- IoI Book Club
- Venue: London
- Date: Ongoing
The Institute of Ideas BookClub meets monthly in central London and is open to all IoI associates. Meetings are usually on a Tuesday from 7-9pm. We discuss contemporary fiction and the social and political issues that this fiction touches upon.
Books previously discussed by the club are: On Beauty (Zadie Smith), The Seymour Tapes (Tim Lott), The Sea (John Banville), The Night Watch (Sarah Waters), Cell (Stephen King), The Plot against America (Philip Roth), Small Island (Andrea Levy), The History of Love (Nicole Krauss), Labyrinth (Kate Mosse), Mailman (Robert Lennon), Saturday (Ian McEwan); Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro); Notes on a Scandal (Zoe Heller); The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown); Oracle Night (Paul Auster); Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood); Death and the Penguin (Andrey Kurkov); Star of the Sea (Joseph O’Connor); Judge Savage (Tim Parks); The Book Against God (James Wood); Snow (Orhan Pamuk); Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre); Millennium People (JG Ballard); State of Fear (Michael Crichton) and Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer).
The IoI BookClub is open to IoI associates. If you do not regularly attend the BookClub and would like to come along please email Geoff Kidder. Any queries please call Geoff on (020) 7269 9224.
Forthcoming Book Club
Tuesday 8 July
Shirley Dent will introduce Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris.
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues. There's Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them. Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine.
Previous Book Club
Wednesday 7 May
Timandra Harkness introduced Digging to America by Anne Tyler.
Friday August 15th, 1997 - The night the girls arrived, two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsy (with her 'more organic than thou' airs, who believes fervently that life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic American razzmatazz. Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family 'only one generation removed from the bazaar') and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant, elusive Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion. Full of achingly hilarious moments and toe-curling misunderstandings, "Digging to America" is a novel with a deceptively small domestic canvas, and subtly large themes - it's about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds. And the end catches you by the throat, ambushes your emotions when you least expect it, as only Tyler can.
Digging to America reviewed on Culture Wars
Tuesday 18 March
David Bowden will introduce Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones.
Bougainville. 1991. A small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. Eighty-six days have passed since Matilda's last day of school as, quietly, war is encroaching from the other end of the island. When the villagers' safe, predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville's children are surprised to find the island's only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. Pop Eye, aka Mr Watts, explains he will introduce the children to Mr Dickens. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the island and prepare a list of much needed items. They are shocked to discover their acquaintance with Mr Dickens will be through Mr Watts' inspiring reading of Great Expectations. But on an island at war, the power of fiction has dangerous consequences. Imagination and beliefs are challenged by guns. Mister Pip is an unforgettable tale of survival by story; a dazzling piece of writing that lives long in the mind after the last page is finished.
Mister Pip reviewed on Culture Wars
Tuesday 22 January
Brendan O'Neill, editor of spiked, will introduce the Booker Prize shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.
At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man begins the tale that has led to his fateful meeting with an uneasy American stranger...Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. He thrives on the energy of New York, his work at an elite firm, and his budding relationship. For a time, it seems that nothing will stand in the way of his meteoric rise to success. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his relationship crumbling and his exalted status overturned. Allegiances are subsequently unearthed, proving themselves more fundamental than money, power and maybe even love.
Tuesday 20 November
The Book Club will discuss Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus' won the Orange Prize and Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Tuesday 18 September 2007
Brenda Stones introduced Restless by William Boyd.
It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.
Tuesday 17 July 2007
Martin Summers introduced A State of Denmark by Derek Raymond.
This book breaks our Book Club rules for only discussing contemporary fiction. Originally published in 1970 and republished this year, it has been argued that A State of Denmark contains a more insightful account of modern Britain than much contemporary fiction. See what you think?
England has become a dictatorship, governed by a sly, ruthless politician called Jobling. All non-whites have been deported, "The English Times" is the only newspaper, and ordinary people live in dread of nightly curfews and secret police. Richard Watt used all his journalistic talents to expose Jobling before he came to power. Now in exile in a farmhouse amid the cruel heat of the Italian countryside, Watt cultivates his vineyards. His remote rural idyll is shattered by the arrival of an emissary from London. Derek Raymond's skill is to make all too plausible the transition from complacent democracy to dictatorship in a country preoccupied by consumerism and susceptible to media spin.
Tuesday 5 June 2007
Ion Martea introduced On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Listen to Ion's introduction:
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Helen Birtwistle introduced The Secret River by Kate Grenville.
Tuesday 3 April 2007
Tim Black introduced Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday.
A review of the book can be found on Times Online.
Tuesday 20 February
Martin Summers introduced Everyman by Philip Roth.
Listen to Martin's introduction in streaming media:
Tuesday 16 January
Ion Martea introduced Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco.
Listen to Ion's introduction:
Monday 20 November
Dr Peter Martin introduced Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
Tuesday 25 July
Josie Appleton introduced 'The Sea' by John Banville, the winner of 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Tuesday 13 June
We discussed 'The Night Watch' by Sarah Waters.
If you would like to attend the Book Club, or would like further information, please join the Institute of Ideas and contact Geoff Kidder on 020 7269 9224 or email geoffkidder@instituteofideas.com
