Links for the next meeting - The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

Coming soon...

Links for the next meeting - The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist on Wikipedia

Pictures & more about book 'Being or Nothingness' that started it all off

CEO Al Dunlap

CEOs & Psychopaths in Business Insider

David Shaylor

Rachel North's blog

There's a long interview with Jon Ronson about the book in the Little Atoms podcast - download it at iTunes here

Links for the next book - Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare

You can see Bernie, Frank, Trudi and - yes - Urban in this video made for The Culture Show at the time of publication.  Urban is 21 at the time of filming.


Bernie Hare and The Shed Crew from andy robbins on Vimeo.

You can see what Bernard Hare is doing now on his own site here

Wikipedia on the East End Park area

A news report on the Angela Pearce murder

For a bit of contrast, here is police blogger Nightjack on 'The Evil Poor'

A discussion of the book on the East Leeds Memories site - the writers tend to be older people who don't still live in Leeds

A very good 5 star review from Amazon: "This is an extraordinarily well written book and cleverly depicts how hard it is for those on the outside to get in"

& a very dismissive 2 star review: "Let's face it, your life is pretty screwed up. But none of this is your fault, at least not according to Bernard Hare; you see this is the fault of Society, which has failed you and your whole community"

Links for the next meeting - The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Below are some reviews and some discussion questions. They're quite wordy but might be a good start.

A review on Nabou.com

A review of it (as a children's book) on The Guardian

Some study questions on Spark Notes...

... & some on LitLovers

also - The Alchemist summarised and more on Wikipedia

It's been said that The Alchemist is essentially the same story as one of the tales in The Arabian Nights - The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through A Dream 

Links for the next meeting - 4 Vintage Classics

Since none of the books are particularly literary, but all have been made into films, it's probably as useful as anything to post links to the trailers!

Flowers in the Attic - Virginia Andrews



(They decided to completely remove any references to incest for the film)

The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M Auel



(Daryl Hannah!)

The Day of the Jackal - Fredrick Forsyth



(& for laughs, here's the remake with Bruce Willis as The Jackal, and Richard Gere as an IRA assassin co-opted to help track him down.  I missed that bit in the book too)



The Boys From Brazil - Ira Levin



Plus - Full film here