Our meeting wasn’t well attended for several reasons, but the five of us had a very interesting and wide-ranging discussion nevertheless.   The topic was Iconic Nonfiction, and the books we chose were The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, 12 Books that Changed the World by Melvyn Bragg, Next to Nature by Ronald Blythe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Thanks to the Melvyn Bragg book we also discussed other works which that author considered significant, for example by Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, Richard Arkwright and William Tyndale. 

  There was plenty to talk about therefore, as you may imagine.