Attending Hay Festival could be one of our goals!

As Ann recently said to me ... "hours you will never get back" and so I want you to be in the same boat. I have become totally hooked on following the Hay Festival . Held in that town in Wales filled with book stores. Here are the dates for 2011: May 26 - June 5. I have read most of the RSS feed supported by The Guardian newspaper, watched many minutes of author interviews and now trying to determine if there is a Hulu for the UK so I can watch every episode of The Book Show. The RSS feeds were so wonderful and when I got to this one today about the "little book club", had to share. This could be us next year!

This little book club went to the Hay festival

by Patrick Barkham; May 31, 2010

How one book club expands its repertoire by going on an annual tour to the Hay festival

In a cottage outside Hay there is the clink of car keys dropping into a bowl on the coffee table as a group of teachers, architects, housing managers and IT officers in 1970s shirts and dresses take turns to read from the "lost" Booker prize novels of 1970.

The car keys and the background music – Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, of course – are little jokes to add an extra dash of that decade to the opening night of this book club's annual trip to the Hay festival. The 10 university friends set up the group five years ago and every year head to Hay for a special session of the club, where they mix nightly discussions of their set texts with a daily trawl of undiscovered and familiar authors at the festival.

Caroline Chatwin, 32, a criminology lecturer based in Canterbury, set up the club so the old friends could expand their reading. Despite being dispersed across Britain, the 10 meet every two months to discuss their chosen book, ending the night by giving it their mark out of 10 – by simultaneously closing their eyes and holding out their fingers.

The highlight, however, is "book club on tour" at Hay. "It's become a staple of the calendar," says Jon Twemlow, a teacher from Sheffield. "It's been really good to see authors we've discussed and discovering authors we wouldn't have otherwise known about," says Rhona Griffiths, who is also a teacher.

If that does not sound very rock'n'roll, the group don't start formal discussions of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat until 11.30pm, when IT officer Mike Brophy stands up and announces: "I really like this book but I'm too drunk to explain why." But debate is sparked up and continues until the small hours when they mark Spark with a 7.5/10. At Hay the next day, the group heads off en masse to see Andrea Levy. Members so far have loved Kazuo Ishiguro ("very self-possessed"), Quentin Blake and Grayson Perry. Each year, Hay offers up surprises. Jan Morris was their big discovery last year, and members are already buying armfuls of books, which they will nominate for discussions. But Hay does not always turn them on to their favourites. Three years ago, they were persuaded to pick up Martin Amis's Yellow Dog. Its final score? 0.64/10, the lowest ever.