No bonkbusters allowed

It's a Sunday afternoon in Willesden library. In a tight horseshoe of chairs sits a group of perhaps 15 people. They span nationalities, colours and generations. The one common denominator is the book of which they are all clutching copies: Magnus Mills's All Quiet on the Orient Express. Welcome to the first birthday of one of London's innumerable book clubs.

My neighbour is Muriel, a black woman who has funky granny specs, a sexy lisp and blue and white nail varnish. Muriel, needless to say, is not without spark. When I tell her I'm researching an article about reading groups, she leans over and whispers in my ear: "If you write that we're a bunch of saddos, I'll break your legs."

Book clubs are one of the social phenomena of the age, right up there with text messaging, health clubs and reality TV. They drifted over from America and are now telling us a lot about who we have become.

One report this week even claimed that single people are shunning nightclubs for book clubs in order to meet members of the opposite sex. "Book clubs are a bit like gym memberships," says one disenchanted veteran of two of them. "If people actually led real lives, instead of sitting at desks and riding in cars all the time, they wouldn't need gyms. The same goes for book clubs. If people read, and had friends who read, (and saw them sometimes) they wouldn't need book clubs."

A survey for Reading Groups, a study of the book-club boom by Jenny Hartley, established that 69 per cent of reading groups are all-female, while only four per cent are all-male. This is one way in which Channel 4's new Friday-night comedy, The Book Group, is not only unfunny but wildly inaccurate. In the story so far, a dowdy American woman newly arrived in Glasgow sets up a reading group. Her secret game-plan, we soon discover, is to get laid for the first time in absolutely ages. Unfortunately, the three other females in the group are far more attractive footballers' wives, while the men consist of a dipsomaniac with no interest in reading, a pretentious young academic and a gentle soul in a wheelchair. There is almost no talk of books, but much talk of sex and football. The characters break away into small groups and make passes at one another.

In reality, most female-run book clubs don't want male members. "I wouldn't go if there were men," says Kimberly Fortier, publisher of The Spectator, who belongs to the fabulously grand Hugh Street club, consisting of a dozen well-heeled movers and shakers including Sarah Standing, the writer wife of actor John, Georgia Coleridge, who is married to the MD of Conde Nast, and casting director Celestia Fox.

"I have to deal with men all day. Women don't ridicule other women's point of view. It's not an alpha-dog, highly aggressive pee-on-the-curtains way of being. Men want to come in and lift their leg over everything. Women are competitive and aggressive but they don't talk about books in order to win," says Fortier.

Another book club regular, an eminent literary agent whose seven-strong club consists of women in and around publishing, says that any man who came near the group "would be eaten alive".

This kind of behaviour certainly doesn't happen in Willesden, where Roger, the facilitator, is in charge of a group set up through a Brent Council initiative to get people's noses in books. Roger is the alpha male. It's his job to get the ball rolling. He does this by rolling the ball to a tall, thin, middle-aged man with an earring who is invited to give his comments first.

That must make him the beta male. In all my research into book clubs, they were the only two men I came across outside London's most impossibly rarefied book club. This consists of the writers Alan Hollinghurst, Rupert Christiansen, Jonathan Keates and Miranda Seymour