The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

Blimey has 2011 ended already? We’ve been so busy reading our way through piles of brilliant books that we’d hardly noticed! We thought it might be nice to fill you in on what everyone’s been reading, so here’s The Dabbler Book Club’s round up of the year just gone….

We’ve had an amazing response to the Dabbler Book Club this year, with nearly 1,000 members now signed up, and it’s been great fun doing it along the way. We get to share and discuss books we like, and our bibliophile members get free copies of great books landing on their doormat! If you haven’t found yourself with a review copy yet, don’t worry, there’s plenty more amazing new books in the pipeline for 2012.

Since starting the Dabbler Book Club in the summer we’ve had a fantastic selection of books pass through our hands – but we’re always on the look out for more – so if you ever see a book that you really think we should be covering, then do let us know at editorial@thedabbler.co.uk

Fiction & Literature Roundup 

In June we kicked things off properly with This Party’s Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson, reviewed with relish on The Dabbler here. Popular with all our reviewers this was probably our book of the year. Whilst Tim Binding’s novel The Champion, also featured that month, was a bit of a marmite book from the reviews and comments it seems. There was also a giveaway of Sue Gee’s acclaimed new short story collection Last Fling.

Some lucky Dabblers also managed to win hardcover copies of Elif Batuman’s brilliantly eccentric memoir The Possessed (read Brit’s review here), which has since gone on to universally rave reviews in the press.

August saw the Book Club choosing the booker prize nominated Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and we also had the kind of giveaway to send a true booklover into a spin – Kingsley Amis’ Complete Stories. In October we went highbrow and chose Solzenitsyn’s newly released book  Apricot Jam and Other Stories. At the same time we ran another book in a very different vein that turned out to be very popular with reviewers, a darkly comic romp called The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt.

Another great book that we had the pleasure of reading (and our first ebook to be featured) was Dabbler Gaw’s Russian thriller Region of Sin, a twisting tale of nefarious deeds and financial intrigue set on an international stage, which seems to be popular not just with dabblers but with reviewers on Amazon too.

History, Biography & Popular Science round up

Way back in July our Book Club Choice was Walk the Lines by Mark Mason, a trip around London following the tube map. In the same month we also featured a giveaway of Ian Vince’s brilliant The Lie of The Land which we found to be a wonderfully refreshing reapprasial of the oft overlooked geographyof the British Isles.

More recently in November we teamed up with Granta to offer book club members copies of Map of a Nation – A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt. Described as a ‘brilliant book. . . . history at its best’ by A N Wilson.

On top of all that we’ve had the enigmatic Elberry give us a detailed look at the Soviet experiment contained within the pages of Spies and Commissars by Robert Service; And November’s choice, by popular demand, was Clive James’ freshly-published A Point of View, a collection of the 60 pieces he contributed to the Radio 4 programme of the same name.We thoroughly enjoyed James’s witty, learned book and the chance to read such an intelligent and questioning chronicle of life in twenty-first century Britain.

Help spread the word!

Help the Dabbler Book Club to thrive in 2012 by telling all your bibliophile friends about it. We’ve got big plans for the club, and the more members we have, the more likely they are to happen.

You can sign up your friends, enemies, grandparents, aunties etc yourself; and send the link to this page to anyone you think might be interested:
http://thedabbler.co.uk/the-dabbler-book-club/