Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates's 1961 masterpiece about a suburban couple in the 1950s, is currently in production using various locations in Connecticut.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Wheeler, searching for meaning on the job at Knox Business Machines.  Is he as special as he thinks he is or is just another young man on the rise?  Will he find meaning at the end of a martini glass at lunch?  Kate Winslet plays April Wheeler, aspiring thespian and mother.  The director?  Sam Mendes, married to Winslet and according to IMDb, also, perhaps, directing a movie based on the George Eliot classic of all classics Middlemarch.  

Your club will be ultra-prepared when you plan a discussion of 1950s American hope and crushing ennui and then segue into how Middlemarch changed the history of the novel.

But cheer up, Revolutionary Road movie night is only a year away. 

You mean you don't have a historic venue for your regular meetings?  Consider this real estate listing and drop in on the already existing club. It has been meeting at this historic Dorset rectory for over a decade and has no plans to leave.

What to select for your first meeting in the conservatory?  Try the latest William Boyd novel, Restless, newly released in paperback.  It is the master's ninth novel, a story of World War II esponiage crosscut with a storyline that takes place in the 1970s where a daughter tries to unravel her mother's story.  Guess which era is the more successfully rendered?  Don't miss the scenes in pre-Pearl Harbor New York City and the thrilling action out West. 

By now you know the club members who watch The Sopranos and want to dedicate a portion of the club to discussing Tony, Carmela, Dr. Melfi and the rest of the gang.  But have you discussed it as the last, great 19th century novel?

The New Yorker's David Remnick compares The Sopranos to a "sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century", citing Charles Dickens's special affinity to Paulie Walnuts.  Your own comparing and contrasting might go on all night, not neglecting Dickens's Bleak House,  The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and of course, Vanity Fair by William Thackeray.

A transitional idea for those not convinced?  Try Slate's TV club of insiders, including in this round, NBC's Brian Williams who can actually write.  The crew attempts to answer the question: Is the end of the Sopranos the end of the mob drama?  I know I care.

Meanwhile, the end is near. So wise up the uninitiated with the complete library of SopranosDVDs and begin your parallel discussion of life after the Bada Bing.    

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to choose a light, possible frothy book club selection for summer.  It seems that there is one annointed every summer season like The Nanny Diaries, now with the Scarlett Johansson-plus-tot cover in anticipation of the upcoming (September) movie.  I can't wait to see Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti as Mrs. and Mr. X.

At book clubs, we need something fun, but pithy. Dare we say it?  It might be a book that makes a better movie than a book.  But we can't really wait for the movie, we need to decide now.

Mergers & Acquisitions by Dana Vachon has many of the criteria we seek.  Set in Manhattan? Check.  Features young, good looking people on the rise and fall? Check. A slightly bewildered protagonist with a handy Blueberry at his side for taking notes on members of his doomed and ascending rat pack? Check. 24-hour party people partaking of lots of sex and drugs?  Check and check.

The protagonist is Tommy Quinn, recently graduated from Georgetown "cum nihilo," and he finds himself in the training program of investment bank J.S. Spenser.  Read: J.P. Morgan and Duke, the author's real alma maters.  Romance happens, New York clubs are dissected, and the author did not forget to include an outre, gonzo character, Roger Thorne.  Roger has all the great lines and gets to fight pirates in an over the top, but why not? party scene.

Is Mergers & Acquisitions really as good as Bright Lights, Big City?  We forget and anyway, summer approaches. 

If you are like me and receive dozens of email newsletters pitching the latest books for reading groups, you open them, you read them and then you sigh.  But there is one set of newsletters I actually look forward to and it is from the The Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass.

Each week the News from Harvard Book Store recommends the latest (Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland), and the current hits (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah who recently visited the store).  But best of all, it has an eclectic, up-to-the minute best-seller list.  No. 1 in Hardcover this week is The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon and in paperback, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.

But the best newsletter is from its Book Club Program.  It doesn't exactly arrive every month, but when it does, it is cause for celebration.  In the March issue, the selections range from the newish (The Inheritance of Loss and Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai) to the classic (The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway).  And while we are on the subject of Hemingway, don't miss the unabridged audio collections of the Hemingway canon read hauntingly by superb actors.  Campbell Scott reads For Whom the Bell Tolls and for once it all makes perfect sense. William Hurt reads The Sun Also Rises CD and A Farewell to Arms is read by John Slattery in clear, almost heartbreaking tones.

In the March issue, a reader requests a book for her Spy Novel Book Club.  The guidelines?  The book had to be one that no one had yet read, it had to be exciting and it had to transcend the boundaries of the genre.  The book turned out to be Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene.

And those guidelines might be just the thing for any kind of book club, yes?