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About us

Caversham Critics is a Reading (UK) based book club. We are a friendly, welcoming group of people who love reading and talking about books. We read a real variety of books; from 18th Century classics to modern bestsellers, Booker prize winners and everything between. Our only criteria is that it should be good and should provoke discussion.

We welcome all readers, and actively encourage people of all races, beliefs and sexuality to take part. We often welcome people who are new to Reading as well as those who have lived here for years.

We meet every month, on the first Monday of the month. The conversation is quite informal and we go around the group discussing the reasons we liked, or disliked the book and talking about any themes and topics it raised. We sometimes agree, often disagree and the conversation is always interesting.

Request to join!

We are using the app Spond to organise meetings and share information. Open the link to join: https://spond.com/invite/LLQGN
When registering please don't add your full DoB, just month and year are required by the app.

Any questions?

Feel free to drop us a message at [email protected].
This book club is run by volunteers, we will get back to you but it may not be immediate 😊

We meet the first Monday of the month in Reading town centre.
(our Sci-fi group meets every six weeks)

How do we choose books?

After the discussion we pick the next book to read (for 2 months time). Everyone is free to suggest a title, (or titles) and give an outline of the book and why they are suggesting it. The group votes and the winning book becomes the next choice. Using this method means we not only get a variety of titles on our reading list, but it's also a truly democratic process. If a book doesn't get picked, it can be suggested again; some of our recent great reads have won after a couple of months of just missing out in the vote.

We tend to pick 'non-genre' books. There is a science fiction splinter group which caters for this, who meet every 6 weeks; you will see their meetups and details on our page as well.

We do have a set of rules/guidelines that we ask people to follow. We ask people to bear these in mind when suggesting a book to make the group an inclusive, accessible, and fun group to be part of.