The BAS Book Club

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The BAS Book Club

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An English speaking book discussion group in Warsaw, set up in 2011 by British Alumni Society. Meets once a month to discuss books and exchange ideas .

Membership by application to [email protected]. An English speaking discussion group dedicated to reading books and talking them over togethr over a glass of w**e. It comprises a Reading Group organised around the Anglican community in Warsaw and the BAS Book Club which merged activities in 2016. The group has no religious bias and people of all creeds may be admitted.

16/09/2026

Here it is - a brand new season for BAS Book Club at the exciting new location Południk 2.0 , Wilcza 25 Warszawa. New address, new meeting time - 6PM, and a new reading list.

October 8 Olga Tokarczuk "Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead"
In a remote village on the Polish-Czech border, a series of mysterious deaths unsettles the local community. An eccentric, fiercely independent woman becomes convinced that the victims’ deaths are connected—and that the animals may know more than the people do. Part crime story, part philosophical reflection, Tokarczuk’s novel explores justice, morality, nature, and the uneasy boundaries between humans and the living world.

November 24 Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita "
When the Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow with his bizarre entourage, chaos, satire and the supernatural follow. Alongside this darkly comic story unfolds a tragic love affair and a novel within the novel about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. The Master and Margarita is a wildly imaginative tale of love, freedom, good and evil—and of how people may betray not through cruelty, but through fear, weakness or indifference.

December 14 Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice"
A clever young woman meets a man she is certain she cannot stand—and discovers, rather inconveniently, that she may have been wrong about him, herself, and almost everyone else. Beneath its sparkling wit and romantic plot, Pride and Prejudice is a wonderfully sharp study of how pride, prejudice, money and social expectations can distort the way we see other people—and ourselves.

January 14 Oscar Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray"
A beautiful young man makes a wish that he will remain forever young while his portrait bears the marks of his life. The wish comes true—but as Dorian pursues pleasure without consequences, the picture begins to reveal what he himself refuses to see. Wilde’s dark, seductive novel asks how long we can live with the face we show the world when our true self is quietly becoming someone we can no longer bear to face.

February 8 Han Kang "The Vegetarian "
A woman decides to stop eating meat—and what begins as a seemingly simple refusal gradually becomes something far more radical. As her family struggles to understand and control her, her withdrawal from ordinary life exposes their own desires, violence and need for conformity. The Vegetarian is an unsettling, dreamlike story about the body, freedom, and what happens when a person simply refuses to play the role others have chosen for her.

March 18 Simon Sebag Montefiore "Speeches that Changed the World "
From Pericles to Churchill, from Abraham Lincoln to Hi**er (!) , or Martin Luther King Jr., these are speeches delivered when words mattered—and sometimes changed what people believed was possible. Montefiore brings together voices from moments of war, revolution, crisis and hope, showing how a few minutes of spoken words can outlive the people who uttered them.

April 20 Peter Watts “The Blindsight”
A crew of radically altered humans is sent to the edge of the Solar System to investigate an alien signal—and discovers something that challenges the most basic assumptions about intelligence, consciousness and what it means to be human. Blindsight is hard science fiction at its most unsettling: a first-contact story in which the truly frightening question may not be whether the aliens are intelligent, but whether we are.

May 25 Amos Oz "Judas"
In 1959 Jerusalem, a young man researching the life of Jesus becomes fascinated by the figure everyone else has agreed to despise: Judas. Was he really the betrayer—or someone whose story was written by the victors? Amos Oz uses this provocative reimagining to explore betrayal, loyalty, faith, and the painful possibility that history may look very different from the other side

June 17 Daniel Keyes “Flowers for Algernon”
Charlie Gordon is given an experimental treatment that dramatically increases his intelligence. For the first time, he begins to understand the world—and the people around him—in ways he never could before. But intelligence brings discoveries he may not be ready for, and Charlie must confront a painful question: if you could become someone else, would you still be yourself?

Would you like to know more? send me a message at [email protected]

23/08/2026

Come and help us shape the new season 📚

After a summer of musings, it is time to get back together — and this year, our first meeting has a special purpose.

On Tuesday, 15 September we will be gathering at Południk 2.0, Wilcza 25 at 6 PM to do something I always find enormously enjoyable: putting together our reading list for the coming season. Choosing the books together, arguing about them a little, and deciding what kind of journey we want to take as a group.

This is a new venue for us — chosen partly by circumstance, partly by design. Whether it becomes our regular home this season remains to be seen, but I have a good feeling about it. And meeting in a public place for the first time has its own advantages: it is easier to walk into than someone's living room, and easier to walk out of if you decide it's not for you. Though I hope you won't.

It is, in many ways, the perfect first meeting for anyone curious about the Book Club. No book to have read in advance. No preparation required. Just come, meet the regulars, have a say in what we read, and see whether this is something you'd like to be part of.

A number of people have asked whether they could simply send in their recommendations rather than attend. Of course you can — all suggestions are welcome. But if you can come in person, do. There is something about sitting around a table with fellow readers, faces rather than names, that no email quite replaces.

All are welcome. See you there.

20/08/2026

Who is behind all this?

Throughout this summer I have been posting about the joys of reading and sharing books with others. One or two of you have asked: is this professional? Am I an academic, an editor, a reviewer?

None of the above. I am simply a passionate reader.

I started at five and never really stopped. A library slip from my twelfth year records over two hundred books borrowed in a single school year — and that was a year that included two months in hospital. I went on to read English Literature at university, which changed nothing except making the habit official.

Life got busier, recommendations harder to find, and for a while I am ashamed to admit I retreated into crime fiction. Enjoyable, but not quite enough.

Book clubs rescued me. When I joined the board of the British Alumni Society Poland, I started one — an English-speaking group open to everyone, Polish, British, and occasionally something else entirely. We have met in cafés, in clubs, and for many years now in my own home. Fifteen years have passed, unbelievably.

In that time I have read well over a hundred books that genuinely mattered. I have met close to thirty people — some briefly, some for years before life took them elsewhere, some who became dear friends.

I am now retired, and the Book Club remains one of the great pleasures of my life. The companionship, the stimulation, the mix of generations around the table. I still look forward to it every month.

And I still hope that a new book lover or two might find us and join the bliss

18/08/2026

The thing you keep meaning to do

I have been meaning to take up dancing for approximately twenty years. I have also, at various points, been fully committed to learning to ski, joining a choir, and taking an Italian course. I have researched all of these things. I have discussed them with enthusiasm. I have, on occasion, gone as far as looking up dates and prices.

You know how this ends (well, with only one exception: skiing) .
There is a particular kind of intention that feels almost like action — vivid, specific, genuinely meant — and yet somehow never quite converts into the real thing. The evening arrives and something else seems more pressing, or more comfortable, or simply more certain. And so the dancing class begins without you, again.

I am not immune to this myself, so I observe it in others without any sense of superiority. Over fifteen years of running a book club I have lost count of the people who wrote to me full of enthusiasm, asked all the right questions, and then quietly never appeared. Some of them have written to me again years later, still meaning to come. Still never did.

I understand them completely.

What I have also noticed, without quite knowing what to make of it, is that the people who do finally show up almost always say the same thing afterwards. That it was nothing like they feared. That they wished they had come sooner.

September, as it happens, is just around the corner.

06/08/2026

Conversations you won't find anywhere else

There was a time when a long train journey invited conversation. Compartments brought people together, distractions were few, and hours stretched ahead. Book clubs offer something surprisingly similar: a shared destination, an excuse to talk, and the luxury of letting a conversation unfold.

I remember conversations like this . You would find yourself sitting opposite a stranger on a long route, a conversation would strike up almost by accident, and somehow — without either of you planning it — it would keep going for hours and reach depths that still stay with you decades later. The train arrived, you parted, and that was that. But something had happened.

A good book discussion has exactly that quality. The book gives everyone permission to go deeper — to talk about mortality, about failed marriages, about the lives we didn't choose, about what we actually believe — under the comfortable cover of talking about characters who aren't us.

Most social conversation is not like this. It skims. It reassures. It circles around the safe and the familiar. Which is fine — it serves its purpose. But it leaves a certain hunger unsatisfied.

After fifteen years I still find it remarkable. You arrive having read the same pages as everyone else. You leave having seen them completely differently. And somewhere in between, without quite noticing it, you have had the kind of conversation that reminds you what conversation is actually for.

30/07/2026

On finding your people

It is one of the quiet paradoxes of modern life. We are more connected than any generation before us — and yet the complaint I hear most often, from people of all ages and backgrounds, is that they cannot seem to find congenial company. People they can actually talk to. People worth knowing.

It is not loneliness exactly — or not the kind that announces itself. It is more like a faint but persistent hunger. The sense that the conversations you are actually having fall somehow short of the conversations you are capable of having.

I hear this from people who have full lives. Busy jobs, families, social commitments. And yet.

What strikes me is that the solution is rarely as remote as it feels. Communities built around a shared passion — for books, for ideas, for the pleasure of a good argument — have always been where congenial people quietly congregate. They are not hard to find. They are simply easy to overlook, or to keep meaning to try, and somehow never quite getting around to it.

Fifteen years of running a book club has taught me one thing above all others. The people who need it most are often the last to arrive. But when they do, they wonder what took them so long.

20/07/2026

The moment that stopped the room

Fifteen years of book club meetings leave you with many memories. But some conversations stay with you in a particular way — the ones where the room collectively realised it had been caught out in an assumption.
A few years ago we were reading Pearl Buck's East Wind West Wind — a novel built on the collision of Eastern and Western attitudes towards women, marriage and the shape of a life. It was, we thought, comfortably historical. A subject we could discuss from a safe distance.
Among our members that year was the daughter of an ambassador from a predominantly Muslim country. Quietly spoken, thoughtful, clearly very bright. As the discussion unfolded, everyone was watching her slightly — wondering, in that politely curious way, what she would make of it all.
She was, she told us, about to return home. Her parents were arranging her marriage.
Sympathetic faces around the table. Careful nods.
How did she feel about it?
Enthusiastic, she said. Completely and genuinely enthusiastic.
The silence that followed was interesting.
She trusted her parents to choose better than she could herself, she explained — she had never had the opportunity to mix freely with men. But more than that: she looked at the Western custom of dating, of relationships before marriage, and felt not envy but something closer to distaste. It meant, she observed, that marriage changes nothing. Brings nothing new. Whereas she was standing on the edge of a great adventure — the freedom, for the first time, to travel with a man, to go to a restaurant together, to build a shared life from scratch.
We had been preparing to feel sorry for her. She pitied us instead.
I have thought about that evening many times since. Which is, I suppose, exactly what books are for.

03/07/2026

Why we read in company
Reading is, by its nature, a solitary act - just you and the page. No one to consult, no one to impress, and no one is going to “check” if your views are “correct” (the sad remnant of analysing books at school). But here comes its limitation.
Because here is what happens when you read alone. You finish a book, something has stirred in you, you have thoughts, and then — what? Casual conversations rarely give you an opportunity to bring those up. You may have noticed, if you try to mention it to someone. They nod politely and usually that is it. The conversation moves on. And all that the book stirred up in you goes quietly nowhere.
A book club is the answer to that particular frustration. Not because the group will tell you what to think — quite the opposite. The best discussions I have witnessed over fifteen years are the ones where the room divides cleanly in two, where someone articulates a reading of a character or a scene that you find utterly baffling, and yet — ten minutes later — you can see exactly what they mean.
That is not a conversation about a book. That is a conversation about how differently two people can move through the world. What a lesson for our generation, so often frightened of division and starved for connection.

14/06/2026

And that's a wrap.
Summer now. No meetings until September. But the conversations have a way of continuing in your head long after you've left the room — which is, I suppose, the whole point.
Fifteen years ago, a small group of us sat down to discuss a book together. It was "The Great Gatsby". We weren't sure it would last beyond the first meeting. It has lasted rather well.
Last week we closed another season — our fifteenth — with David Szalay's Flesh. It was, as these final meetings tend to be, about much more than the book. It always is.
That is the thing about a book club that takes itself seriously. You come prepared to talk about a Hungarian man's improbable journey through life, and you end up talking about your own. You do or don't say that it is about you. About choices and their consequences. About the lives we planned and the ones we ended up living. About what we recognise in characters nothing like us.
Those ideas reverberate differently to what you gain from watching movies. They seem to embed themselves in ways that mere visuals rarely do and continue to speak to the reader.

More soon.

09/06/2026

Our discussion of David Szalay's Flesh turned out to be one of those evenings where a book raises more questions than it answers.

There were many possible directions we could have taken. We might have talked about the gap between appearances and reality, the pursuit of success, or the way material ambitions can leave surprisingly little behind once they are achieved. Yet one question quickly took centre stage:

Is István, the novel's protagonist, a believable human being?

Some around the table were convinced that he was not. They had never encountered anyone so emotionally withdrawn, so detached from his own feelings and aspirations, so seemingly content to drift through life without purpose or reflection.

Others disagreed. They felt they knew exactly the kind of person Szalay was describing. In fact, they argued that István represents a growing phenomenon: people focused almost exclusively on immediate pleasures and practical concerns, with little interest in larger questions of meaning, purpose, or connection.

From there our discussion moved naturally to a broader question: what is literature for?

Should novels present ideals and possibilities, helping us become better versions of ourselves? Or should they hold up a mirror, even when the reflection is uncomfortable?

The word that repeatedly surfaced was solipsism—a life centred almost entirely on one's own desires and experiences, with little curiosity about the inner lives of others. Some felt Flesh portrayed exactly such a world.

Yet perhaps that is why the book proved so fascinating to discuss. Whether one sees István as a convincing portrait of modern life or as an exaggerated caricature, the novel forces us to consider what gives human existence depth and meaning.

By the end of the evening we had reached no final agreement. But then, the best discussions rarely do. They leave us with new questions, new perspectives, and the feeling that a book has opened a door rather than closed one.

And that, perhaps, is exactly why we keep coming back.

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