📚🚶2024 with Emily's Walking Book Club
Season's Greetings & our Books of the Year
Dear walking book clubbers,
Season’s Greetings!
And thank you so much to Jab for this great photo of our Seasonal Book Swap on Hampstead Heath, in which we all gave one another a book we loved. So simple and so effective! Thanks to everyone for making it happen and especially to Maura, who had the bright idea a couple of years’ ago.
This weekly newsletter will be paused until 2025 while I disappear into the pages of our January book, eat far too many mince pies and talk Alfie for lots of walks (even though he hasn’t quite mastered the art of talking about books!).
And will you be among the many people re-reading The Dark is Rising (our 2023 Christmas pick) in real time again this year? Reminding you of the brilliant podcast adaptation by Complicite and the BBC World Service, HERE.
My next email will be landing in your inbox on Monday 6th January, when I’ll be introducing Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry, our first book of 2025 - details and booking links for this below.
News of 2025
Here are the dates for your diary, in case you missed last week’s post:
January: Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry
Friday 17th Regent’s Park | Sunday 19th Hampstead Heath | Monday 20th Zoom
February: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Megan Backus
Friday 14th Regent’s Park | Sunday 16th Hampstead Heath | Monday 17th Zoom
March: Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald
Friday 14th Regent’s Park (with the Daunt Books Festival) | Sunday 16th Hampstead Heath | Monday 17th Zoom
April: Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
Friday 4th Regent’s Park | Sunday 6th Hampstead Heath | Monday 7th Zoom
You can book on to three of our four Regent’s Park walks here. (This is minus the March Human Voices walk, which will go on sale via Daunt Books as part of their Festival.)
You can book on to all four of our Hampstead Heath walks here:
Tickets for individual walks and more details of our first four books of 2025 are here:
Something for Christmas?
The combination of a gift subscription to this weekly newsletter and tickets onto our first four walks of 2024 (or any of the individual events) makes an inspiring literary Christmas present.
I’m happy to create bespoke packages - just email me with XMAS in the subject line and I’ll get back to you (thanks to those who’ve already done this!).
Looking back on 2024
Our books for 2024 were as follows. In case you’d like to discover more about each book, I’ve linked to my intro and YouTube video for each one.
January: The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd
February: My Ántonia by Willa Cather
March: The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
April: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born
May: The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
June: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
July: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb translated by Len Rix
September: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
October: Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell
November: The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg
December: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
How many did you read? Did you have a favourite? I’d love to know!
And the stats…
Many thanks to Roy, who has created this brilliant little statistical report on our books:
The oldest book is Little Women (1868). 8 are from the 20th century - of those only 2 were published before 1950.
There were 5 books by male authors, 6 from female authors.
Author's nationalities: 4 Americans, 2 English, 1 Scottish, 1 Australian, 1 Norwegian, 1 Nigerian, 1 Hungarian.
The primary settings for all the books span 9 countries: interestingly the only country locale which repeats across books is America (featured in 3 books)
There were 2 writers of colour this year.
Only 3 of the authors are still living.
Over to you
Somehow we are now at nearly 3,000 members. Hello everyone!
Thank you so much for making this such a special community, a space to share a love of books, culture and walks.
It’s incredible to see that we now have readers in 75 countries, with only just over half of you based in the UK. I’m so delighted that our London book club reaches so far across the world - for those of you who can’t usually make our walks on Hampstead Heath or Regent’s Park, do please come along to our Monday evening Zooms, and also feel free to drop me a line to introduce yourself anytime, it’d be wonderful to know a bit more about your reading life in sunnier climes to rainy old England.
I would love to know how you’re finding the book club. If there’s anything you’d like to see more - or less - of in this newsletter, tell me. Am I getting the balance of books right? Are you enjoying the new format of the monthly On Our Reading Radar? How have you found our year of walking in Regent’s Park as well as Hampstead Heath? Is there anything else I could and should be doing?
January **tickets now on sale**
Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry
Funny, compassionate, transporting and revealing, these eleven interlinked short stories detail the day-to-day life of a Parsi community in an apartment building in 1960s-70s Bombay. In a beautiful mosaic of seemingly ordinary lives, we get to know some colourful characters, while Mistry explores tensions of tradition and modernity, home and diaspora. This intriguing collection of stories, first published in 1987, was the Canadian-Indian author’s debut, before he went on to write three prize-winning novels, including A Fine Balance.
Keen to know more? Read THIS fascinating profile of Rohinton Mistry by Angela Lambert in the Guardian.
In Regent’s Park: Friday 17th January, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-£20
On Hampstead Heath: Sunday 19th January, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-£20
On Zoom: Monday 20th January, 8-9pm, £1-£15
Buy Tales from Firozsha Baag from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.
Happy reading, and Happy New Year!
Emily