Reading Circle: books, books, books

The Reading Circle of Sandra and Andrew (‚Sandrew‘) Milne-Skinners is running already over 12 years and over 100 books have been spoken about. FREIRAD shows you a list of these books – so you never run out of the next thrilling „literaventure“.

Reading Circle has been running for over 12 years. The Circle meets once a month, on a Friday evening, now at 6pm, in different venues, to discuss the next book democratically voted on by the group present at the previous session. Whoever first promoted the book prior to the vote then usually kicks off the discussion.

We have 42 registered members. On average, a dozen members attend the Friday evening session. The location for the meeting depends on who volunteers to host the session. We usually have a welcome drink, with nibbles, for about half-an-hour. Then follows the running discussion over 90 minutes (and even up to two hours!) A buffet then follows. After some ¾ of an hour, we have a round of ‘A Book a Minute’, where members recommend books for other members to read. Finally, 3 or 4 books are proposed for discussion at the next session – each introduced by a proposer/ promoter for 2 or 3 minutes. We then vote as to which book is to be discussed. (If the vote is close, we may well choose the book in second position for the next but one session.)

On the first Tuesday of each month, at 8pm Austrian time, Freirad broadcast our edited 30-minute programme about the book discussed in the previous month. That programme is repeated on the following Monday morning at 11 am Austrian time. Both broadcasts can be heard live via Internet.

Previous programmes from 2016 onwards can be heard on the Cultural Broadcasting Archive.

Reading Circle: Booklist at a glance

2012

• Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

2013

• Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap
• Chimamdah Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun
• Philip Roth: The Dying Animal (filmed as Elegy)
• Kenneth Steven: Anthology of Poems
• Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible
• Hilary Mantel: Bring Up the Bodies
• Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey
• Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes

2014

• Richard Ford: Canada
• John Lanchester: Capital
• Jhumpa Lahiri: Namesake
• Alice Munro: Short Stories (a selection…)
• Carol Shields: Unless
• Kate Atkinson: Life After Life
• John Williams: Stoner
• Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

2015

• Julia Otsuka: The Buddha in the Attic
• E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
• Chimandah Ngozi Adichie: Americanah
• Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger
• Richard Flanagan: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
• Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See
• Julian Barnes: Levels of Life
• Harper Lee: Go Set a Watchman

2016

• Ian McEwan: The Children Act
• Muriel Spark: The Driver’s Seat
• Hugo Hamilton: The Speckled People
• Richard Russo: Empire Falls
• Imre Kertész: Fateless
• James Salter: Light Years
• Shakespeare: The Tempest
• Alan Bennett: The Lady in the Van
• Ta Nihisi Coates: Between the World and Me
• Jane Gardam: The Man in the Wooden Hat

2017

• A.L. Kennedy: Serious Sweet
• Ian McEwan: Solar
• Trevor Noah: Born a Crime
• Graham Swift: Mothering Sunday
• Elizabeth Strout: Olive Kitteridge
• Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time
• Rachel Cusk: Outline
• Max Porter: Grief is the Thing with Feathers
• Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad
• Robert McCrum: Every Third Thought
• Margaret Atwood: Hagseed

2018

• Elif Shafak: Three Daughters of Eve
• Ted Chiang: Story of Your Life
• Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World
• Amos Oz: Judas
• Anne Tyler: A Spool pf Blue Thread
• Elizabeth Strout: The Burgess Boys
• Sabastian Faulks: A Week in December
• Colm Toibin: Brooklyn
• Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer
• Rachel Joyce: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
• Barbara Kingsolver: Unsheltered

2019

• Tara Westover: Educated
• Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach
• Kate Atkinson: Transcription
• Celeste Ng: Everything I Never Told You
• Amos Oz: A Tale of Love and Darkness
• Julian Barnes: The Only Story
• Val McDermid: A Place of Execution
• Jonathan Coe: Middle England
• Robert Pimm: Blood Summit
• Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me
• Gail Honeyman: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

2020

• Edward Snowden: Permanent Record
• Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other

6 MONTHS GAP BECAUSE OF CORONA-VIRUS RESTRICTIONS

• Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing
• Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

2021

• Janet Frame: An Angel at my Table
• Jan Morris: Trieste, the Meaning of Nowhere
• Lily King: Euphoria
• Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
• Sophy Richards: The Lost Pianos of Siberia
• Chigozie Obioma: An Orchestra of Minorities
• Maggie O’Farrell: Hamnett
• Ali Smith: Autumn
• Philippe Sands: The Ratline

2022

• Damon Galgut: The Promise
• Meriel Schindler: The Lost Café Schindler
• Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

INTERVIEW WITH MERIEL SCHINDLER

• Abdulrazak Gurnah: Paradise
• Isabel Allende: Violeta
• Lucy Irvine: Castaway
• Julia Boyd/ A. Patel: A Village in the Third Reich
• Linda Hogan: Solar Storms
• Elif Shafak: The Island of Missing Trees
• Michael Cunningham: The Hours
• (Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway)

2023

• Ian McEwan: Lessons
• Casey Cep: Furious Hours
• No Violet Bulawayo: We Need New Names
• Monica Ali: Love Marriage
• Miriam Toews: A Complicated Kindness
• Gabriela Garcia: Of Women and Salt
• Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
• Ingrid Persaud: Love after Love
• Jean Hanff Korelitz: The Latecomer

2024

• Natasha Brown: Assembly
• J.M. Coetzee Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
• Jon Fosse: Scenes from a Childhood
• Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These
• T.C. Boyle: The Tortilla Curtain
• Paul Lendvai Austria: Behind the Mask
• …

TO BE CONTINUED…