How to mix a reading group

If Alex and I get away on schedule, then I've been to my last reading group until we're back in six months or so. I'm missing it already! Of course we'll take books away with us. Alex is a great reader, so there's no having to justify the extra space or weight of my on-board library. His first present to me all those years ago was a hardback copy of Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. In fact, the man is a menace in a bookshop, as uncontrollable as my sister in a shoe shop. Still, he and I can't replicate the alchemy of the reading group. We girls have something special.

Over the years, I've often been asked by curious friends how our reading group works. The mechanics are simple. We meet every five or six weeks, at someone's house. A day or so before the meeting we start talking on email about food. Only once have we ended up with four desserts. There's always decent wine. We chat. Of course we chat. It's part of the pleasure, but the rump of the evening, the meaty part, is after dinner when we pull out our books.

Everyone's pile has two kinds of books - those they've borrowed previously, and are returning or wanting more time to read, and new books they're bringing to the group. When someone returns a book they've read, they talk about it,  and since often someone else, or perhaps everyone else, has already read that book and/or others by the same author, discussion is on-going and magnified. However, our greatest joy  - and call us bluestockings (if you are that old) or nerds - is in sharing a great find, an author new to the rest of us,  and persuading someone else to give his/her book a go. I would never have read the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's 1958  novel Things Fall Apart if not for reading group, for example. As it is, the first time I borrowed it, I was too agitated to let myself relax into Achebe's speech rhythms. I returned it unread. A year later, I was persuaded to try again, and this time I was ripe for its famous spell.

The more usual model for a reading group or book club wouldn't work for me. It sounds too much like a homework circle. I tense up when I come across a suggested list of questions for book clubs in the end pages of a book. Plus, I hate the thought of having to read a certain book. I like to follow my nose with my reading. What I pick up depends on my mood, on what's happening in my head, in my life. Our model takes that kind of fluidity as a starting point. It works because a) we're all serious readers (as in, we really can't imagine life without books) and b) because we're committed. It's just like playing in a soccer or a netball team. You've got to be committed to turning up, and training, otherwise it's no fun for anyone. The people are the key. We didn't start out as friends. At the beginning we were introduced by a mutual friend, Caroline, who has a genius for putting people together. Some people who've joined our group since its inception, when others have left, haven't worked out, and that's been awkward. I'd say only that you've got to trust your instincts, and when someone doesn't work out, get tough.

I'm going to break out at sea, and read some of Alex's beloved crime fiction. Lee Child and Peter Temple are coming aboard, along with John Banville and Ian McEwan, Siri Hustvedt and Orhan Pamuk, more Moitessier and Francis Chichester, the third Steig Larsson book, Judith Wright's poetry and Montaigne's essays ETC. Of course, I'm fooling myself. There's never enough time to read at sea. My mind will be kidnapped by the world out there. That's what I loved about it last time, but I'll bring the books anyway. I'd frightened to leave home without them.