In The Book Bags we choose a book in rotation and each host our choice at home, on the first Monday of each month. When it's our turn we supply wine and "snackerels", themed according to the book, the time of year or what's on "three for two" at the supermarket, and round off the evening with an increasingly bewildering array of teas. We stagger home by drunken foot, weaving bicycle or necessary taxi at two in the morning, and try not to snap at our children over breakfast.

As far as the choice of books goes, we have a few basic rules:

- the book should be in paperback (affordable and available)

- none of us should have read it before. This rule has necessarily been bent on occasion, but the idea is not to feel too responsible if your choice turns out to be a real stinker, nor to feel possessively hurt if someone doesn't like something about which you've raved; nor, actually, to be denied a month of reading a Book Bag book

- preferably the book should not exceed 500 pages; we meet monthly and realistically books much longer than this have reduced chances of being finished by all members of the group. Slack finishing has occasionally been a bit of a problem, however, and does not benefit the discussion …

- when it is your turn next, you bring along A Bag to the current meeting. We love The Bag. It appears at about midnight and bulges with five or six choices. These are passed around and it is a moment of great excitement (really) as the books are hummed over, scoffed at, coveted or dreaded. And then we decide. We choose by consensus but next month's host, the bringer of The Bag, has the final say

- while the choice can be anything you fancy, in practice it can end up depending on which book has just been discussed, so that like does not follow like. For instance G tends to favour vaguely-classic English books, I follow G and often as not, in contrast, go for American. Similar knock-on effects domino through the group

POINTS

The enjoyment in reading books for our groups falls into four fairly equal parts:

 - one, the actual reading
 - two, the discussion and
 - three, the production of The Bag
 - fourth is the apportioning of points

Point-allotment developed properly at about the same time as the reviews started, for comparison purposes. They became an important element as it caused us to relive past choices, sharpen up our critical comparisons and create some structure. It has led to cohesion and means that the books are not read in isolation. But cross-comparison, sadly, cannot live by points alone and so as time has gone by, we have fine-tuned things further by creating categories. How else can you meaningfully measure 'The Famished Road' against 'The Emperor's Babe'. Admittedly some of the categories may strike the odd person as absurd; why Netherlandish? why Cold? why SickoBollocks? Why indeed (answers, please). They are absurd, but they must have made sense at the time.

We have a sliding scale, from 10 which is to date unattainable, down to 0.5, so far as bad as it's got. With the lowest scoring books we have been quite kind; after all, I believe some GCSE boards award points for pupils writing their name correctly on papers. Who are we to be more stringent? But otherwise, the bits beyond the decimal points are haggled over furiously. Apparently it's quite a "male" thing to do, but, hey, we've got to put our knitting down sometimes.