Arguing about Odysseus for ninety minutes with no crisps left.

The pub one. No reading list, no rules, nobody keeping time, so we started around eight and were still going at half ten, and I've reconstructed most of this from a photo of a beer mat with the word PIGS written on it.

Fiona opened, before anyone had a drink in front of them, with: "Circe is only interesting when there's a man on the island." Which is a thing to say to a room of six women about a book six women picked. Bridget's counter was that the men are weather — they blow in, they wreck the place, they leave, she's still there planting things afterwards — and Fiona said the weather doesn't get its own named chapters and a subplot, and the pair of them went at that for a while without either one moving an inch.

Gail loved the pigs and said so at length. Her argument was that it's the only part of the book with real teeth in it, that everything else is written beautifully in a way which keeps the reader comfortable, and the pigs are the one place you're allowed to enjoy something ugly. Deborah, who had annotated her copy in pencil like a coursework essay, disagreed on the grounds that the ugliest thing in it is Telemachus describing what his father was like at home. She read it out. The table went quiet for a second.

The woman I still can't name — two years she's been coming, I have missed the moment where you're allowed to ask — said the best of it was the pharmacy. The herbs. A woman alone for a thousand years slowly learning what things do. She said she'd happily have read a much longer book of a witch identifying plants and nothing else happening at all, at which point Fiona said "that's a gardening book", and everyone laughed, and I don't believe Fiona was joking.

Yvonne hadn't finished; Yvonne never finishes. She asked whether the baby survives and three people told her at once, one of whom was me, and Bridget did her face about spoilers.

Where I landed, for what it's worth: I thought it was terrific, genuinely, and read it across four nights while my husband watched something with submarines in and kept asking why I was crying about Ancient Greece. The middle is a procession of famous men turning up to be a disappointment, which I'm fairly sure is deliberate and which I still found tiring by about the third one. And the ending, which we gave ninety seconds and should have given an hour, is either the bravest decision in the book or a soft landing, and Fiona and I are on opposite sides of that and will be until one of us moves away.

Eight. Deborah gave it a seven, which from Deborah is a standing ovation.

Next month is Bridget's pick and she is threatening the Odyssey itself, so I've said I'll come and I probably won't...