It sometimes happens. Your host will select a hard to find book. Maybe it won a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe it won a Booker Prize. Maybe you've never heard of it. In any case, it's almost out of print.

Don't be afraid of choosing an atypical book, but have a plan. The library will gather copies from other libraries, so give them and your club plenty of advanced notice. After all, anybody can wander though the current best seller lists or review the book store tables (always in need of refreshing, it seems). Here are a few tips when visiting the country of rare books:

• Follow up with your club the next day with The Plan. Offer a time table of what to expect from the library retrieval process, Amazon, the book store or your own personal library.
• Prepare discussion materials in advance. Most older books that are not classics lack discussion questions and in many cases, sparse supporting information.
• Make sure all members have their books in time, or you will be sitting in a very quiet club next month.

And while we are discussing atypical suggestions, consider these almost-forgotten classics.

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

Peony by Pearl S. Buck

The big screen version of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake will be released in about a month, so if your club is strict about things like reading the book before movie night, there's no time to waste. Many of us had mixed reaction to the book, having admired the author's beautiful, Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter of Maladies. In The Namesake, Gogol Ganguli is a first-generation American with "the name." Lahiri's descriptive language and scenes set in Boston, Calcutta and New York are first rate, but the characters and the plot have to carry the weight of symbolism, clash of cultures and dead Russian authors. Still, Lahiri is a wonderful writer, many club members loved The Namesake and the author will probably write the great American-Bengali family saga in the future.

A new movie-tie-in paperback edition features the film's star Kal Penn, who we all enjoyed seeing last month as a bad guy on 24. The trailer is worth watching for movie night consideration.

The Namesake

The Namesake Trailer

Recently, one my clubs had a visit from Wendy Kann, author of Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa. Her memoir of growing up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, is at once fascinating and harrowing. The author experiences the disintegration of her family as her mother sinks deeper into alcoholism and her father is killed in an explosion - or is it a suicide? The already isolated country is further torn apart by civil war. Wendy moves to America, but her sisters remain in Africa - and then her youngest sister Lauren dies on a lonely road. Miraculously, Lauren's young son Luke and his baby sitter survive.

You can imagine that the club was alive with questions. What became of the family, what is the political situations and what is the latest? Wendy is an author and a neighbor, so there is neighborhood geography along with an inside look at a country and a way of life, vanished forever. For clubs, Casting with a Fragile Thread is a good addition to the robust genre of African memoir.

Increasingly, authors are on the move and visiting clubs everywhere. Here are a few tips:

• When the author arrives, start the club as soon as possible. If there is an extended coffee hour, the author can only talk to small groups of members who will cluster around him, straining to hear. Break up these clusters as soon as possible and begin the club so no feels left out.
• Come prepared with questions and topics. Don't be afraid to tread controversially, but the author is still a guest. Save some comments for next time.
• Ask the author for reading suggestions. Nothing sells a book to the club faster than a recommendation pedigree.

Casting with a Fragile Thread by Wendy Kann

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Memoir by Alexandra Fuller

House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

If your book club is ever forced to choose books for that desert island, don't stop at Everyman's Library centenary list, the 100 essentials (from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). Take the whole library (about 500 titles) for the introductions alone: A.S. Byatt introduces Toni Morrison's Beloved, while Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is introduced by G.W. Chesterton – from the 1907 edition! Chronologies detail the life and times of each author and the club will marvel at your sudden erudition as you access the choice literary trivia at your fingertips.

But not all classics are still in Everyman's Library. This month, I am reading the Everyman's Library edition of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, marking my place with the cloth edition's bound-in ribbon, of course. When I finish the tale of Miss Lily Bart – not really a rise and fall, just a kind of steady descent – I will read the introductions, the chronologies and the select bibliography as a special treat. And then I will return it to the library. It is now a collector's item on Ebay (buy it now: $79.99).

Everyman's Library Centenary List

House of Mirth, Everyman's Edition

House of Mirth, paperback

What are the producers doing with our books? Good things one hopes. And if the recent, superb film version of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil is any indication, we have no worries. Here's where we stand:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl has been optioned by the team that produced The Queen starring Helen Mirren. This doesn't mean it will actually be made into a film and the story of a murder and Blue van Meer's cross-country life with Dad told with an astounding number of film and faux best seller references will be boiled down to the murder mystery.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Pessl followed the Franzen playbook when she sent in her manuscript. And she will have to wait as long as Franzen has for a glimmer of the movie version. David Hare (The Hours) has written a script for a film version, but shouldn't The Corrections get the 12-hour HBO series treatment?

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. The peerless Edward Norton will direct and star as Lionel Essrog, the Human Freakshow, Tourette's sufferer and orphan detective. Keep your fingers crossed for this one.

Atonement by Ian McEwan. Keira Knightly will star as Cecilia and James McEvoy as Robbie Turner. Two actresses will play Briony at ages 13 and 18, with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony at the end of her life.

The Painted Veil

Miramax, Rudin option rights to novel

Atonement, Motherless Brooklyn