RAD Book Club

RAD Book Club is open to RAD staff and Faculty students and has been regularly meeting, every 4-6 weeks, since 2015 to discuss books suggested by its members.

Series 8 2024

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

Kim Ji-Young, born 1982 by Cho Nam-ju

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Series 7 2023

Download Reading List and Meeting Dates:

Titles and dates

Reviews:

• Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam – 25 January 2023
• Sea of Tranquility by Emily St, John Mandel – 30 November 2023
• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – 09 November 2023
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark – 28 October 2023
• Yellowface by R.F. Kuang – 27 July, 2023
• The Magician by Colm Tóibín – 29 June 2023
• Educating Rita by Willy Russell – 18 May 2023

Series 6 2020 – 2021

Meetings continued in hybrid form, as we got to grips with furlough and home-working, again. No reviews or ratings were recorded

Books:

• Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata — 07 December 2021 [Winter Cold Special]
• Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury — 23 November 2021 [Spooky Season Special]
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead — 19 October 2021
• Ugliness, by Gretchen H. Henderson — 07 September 2021
• Dark Tales, By Shirley Jackson — 10 August 2021
• Prisoners of History: What Monuments to the Second World War Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves, by Keith Lowe — 06 July 2021
• Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke — 01 June 2021
• Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand — 04 May 2021
• The Power by Naomi Alderman — 06 April 2021
• The Dig by John Preston — 09 March 2021
• Our Town by Thornton Wilder — 09 February 2021
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness — 12 January 2021
• Through a Glass, Darkly by Jostein Gaarder — 8 December 2020
• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe — 27 October 2020
• The Birds by Daphne du Maurier — 29 September 2020

Series 5 Lockdown special

Due to the lockdown, the reminder of Series 5 plus some extra titles were conducted online. Unfortunately there is no review of these meetings or our ratings:

Books:

• St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell – 18 August 2020
• Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian – 14 July 2020
• Lullaby by Leïla Slimani – 18 June 2020
• Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – 12 May 2020

Series 5 2019 – 2020

Reviews:

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams – 07 April 2020
• This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay – 10 March 2020
• If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin – 04 February 2020
• Becoming by Michelle Obama – 07 January 2020
• Circe by Madeline Miller – 10 December 2019
• The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold – 5 November 2019
•  An American Marriage by Tayari Jones – 1 October 2019

Series 4 2018 – 2019

•  The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa – 26 June 2019
• RAD Book Club review: Who will write our history? – 29 May 2019
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – 17 Apr 2019
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick – 21 Mar 2019
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Feb 2019
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer – 16 Jan 2019
• New Boy (Othello retold) by Tracy Chevalier – 14 Dec 2018
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge – 14 Nov 2018
• The Leavers by Lisa Ko – 11 Oct 2018

Series 3 2017 – 2018

Reviews:

• The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany – 05 Jul 2018
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – 24 May 2018
• The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton – 21 Mar 2018
• I Love Dick by Chris Kraus – 21 Feb 2018
• The Wonder by Emma Donoghue – 17 Jan 2018
• Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter- 30 Nov 2017
• Cartes Postales from Greece by Victoria Hislop – 25 Oct 2017
• His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet – 29 Sep 2017

Series 2 2016 – 2017

Reviews:

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – 13 Jul 2017
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk – 08 Jun 2017
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – 04 May 2017
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – 24 Mar 2017
• The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak- 16 Feb 2017
• The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling – 11 Jan 2017
• A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride – 15 Dec 2016
• The Lake House by Kate Morton – 09 Nov 2016

Series 1 2015 – 2016

Reviews:

• How to be Both by Ali Smith – 17 Nov 2015
• Perfume by Patrick Süskind – 01 Oct 2015
• We are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler – 06 Aug 2015
• Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey – 13 Jan 2016
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro – 09 Mar 2016
• Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb – 08 Sep 2016
• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins – 27 Jul 2016
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe – 06 May 2016
•  At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen — 17 May 2016