Book Club First Anniversary Dinner

Last night our Book Club took a cab into town for our first anniversary dinner. We went to Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter because our book last month was Helen Tse's family memoir about that restaurant and the three generations that have worked there. Lisa Tse was there to welcome us and we had a pretty raucous time, with lots and lots of talking and cocktails and a banquet for six. We did a bit of discussion of the book in hand - Charlaine Harris's first Sookie Stackhouse novel (the title of which I always get wrong.) I hadn't enjoyed it as much as the others did, it seemed. It felt a bit underwritten and unexciting to me. Of course, there was lots of talk of the TV version - Tru Blood - which almost everyone had seen. J. was at home, taping ep one on Channel 4 just as we were talking. So lots of vampire talk as we messed about with chopsticks and devoured springrolls, crispy beef and Lily Kwok's famous curry.

We had two new members joining us last night, too, so there was lots of catching up and recounting tales from our first year of meetings. Already legendary is the evening we did a Kazuo Ishiguro novel and, ninety minutes into discussing it, someone pointed out that my book had a different cover to everyone else's. I think someone said, 'Why's yours got a tree on the front?' And of course it turned out that I'd read the wrong Ishiguro book. We'd been talking about it all that time and no one had noticed that we were on with different books. Dunno what that says about us or Ishiguro, but it was pretty funny.

We've all taken turns to pick next month's book and we've had some triumphs... when everyone enjoyed it and the conversation on the first Wednesday of the month went swimmingly. Like when we did Khaled Hosseini's 'A Thousand Splendid Suns'. That zoomed off into a very involved talk about religion, politics, the whole shebang. Similarly, Patrick Gale's 'Notes on an Exhibition' got a good response from us all.

And we've had some stinkers as well, though. We began with an Alexander McCall Smith mystery, thinking it'd be a gentle, nice, middlebrow beginning for us. But when we turned up for our first autumn meeting last year we found we'd all got annoyed with his rather superior heroine, Isabel Dalhousie and her snobby ways. We'd all kind of enjoyed his Ladies Detective Agency books, but the Edinburgh ones seemed irksomely snooty. His prose is so smooth it's a bit like food blended just that bit too far. Like baby food. I like the stuff about Edinburgh's New Town, though. It reminded me of living there, all that time ago. But we were pretty nonplussed in the end... as we were by a couple of others on our list. Most of us liked Neil Gaiman's 'The Graveyard Book', but it also seemed a bit too slick and cynical as well. Elizabeth Berg - who I adore - struck others as a bit smug and bourgeouis and not a patch on Anne Tyler.

We've got Audrey Niffenegger's new spooky novel up next. I think we all read The Time Traveller's Wife and enjoyed it - though everyone thought it was too long. I'm keen to see what she's doing next. (Though what was that daft boring comic strip she had in the Guardian Review section? They let people do some funny old stuff in that paper...) It'll be good to have something supernatural for the November meet...

So anyway last night was a successful celebration... we toasted our Book Club with cocktails named after Manchester Streets and we were the last ones there. Gossipping and drinking wine club, as I say, is what J. calls us. But what else is there to novels than that?