The Eclectic Shade Tree.

LOCATION: ONLINE

How did your group form?

The Eclectic Shade Tree Book Group began in 2002, when Jason, its facilitator, took his brother's advice and launched an online book club in which they and their friends, but no others, could participate ("no others" in order to avoid the spamming and the trolling that tend to spread across Internet domains open to the public).

How do you choose your books?

Each member is given the power to name whatever title, within specific parameters, he or she wants the members to read. The titles must be novels, since fiction is less likely to alienate readers than even the best nonfiction; novels must be no more than 500 pages long, since club members lead lives apart from reading and should not be required to devote all their attention to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, for instance; and if the novel belongs to a cycle of novels (for example, A. S. Byatt's Frederica Quartet), it must be the first in the cycle.

What does your group look like?

Members come and go, especially when their lives frazzle. At present, our group has seven members, all in their 20s and 30s. Because our "meetings" take the form of messages posted back and forth online, we're scattered far and wide, with current members living in Montana, New York, South Carolina, and Great Britain.

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What books have worked out best for you?

Of the 31 selections we've tackled, we all liked Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; in fact, two of us hailed the character Sissy as one of literature's greatest creations. We also enjoyed Jose Saramago's All the Names (even those of us who found it daunting were beguiled) and Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow, perhaps the most beautifully written novel we've read. Ian McEwan's Atonement elicited our most complex critiques. Many of us thought that Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits was not the masterpiece others consider it; yet the novel made a favorable impression on us all. Finally, we loved Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath; one of us even read the second and third Kristin Lavransdatter novels--and drank numerous bottles of mead--over the subsequent month.

Which novels were duds?

The only novel we found almost wholly without merit was Mick Foley's Tietam Brown. Sure, it made us laugh on occasion, but its schizophrenic narrative and immature voice made it such a target that however funny it was, our posts on it were funnier still. Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore--with its tiresome pedantries and endless solipsism--was a comparative failure in our collective view, but so many of us appreciated parts of it that the group's low opinion was more of a sigh for what might have been.

What other books have you read?

The books with the fiercest admirers and fiercest detractors among us included Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Julian Barnes's Arthur and George, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste. We were entirely indifferent to Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, Graham Swift's Water-land, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Michael Raleigh's In the Castle of the Flynns.

How did you mark your fifth anniversary?

To celebrate Eclectic Shade Tree's anniversary (as well as the marriage of Jason and Kelly, the only two members to begin dating and then marry since the club's inception), we held a swash-buckling summer reading binge which consisted of 20 categories of books. They included The Last Picture Show (graphic novels), The unKnown World (any nonfiction title), The Namesake (books with "eclectic," "shade," or "tree" in their titles), and Walking the Plank (walk down an aisle in a library or bookstore, stop anywhere and close your eyes, touch a spine, then read the book you touch).