You would probably never think it, looking at the overambitiously packed shelves in my living room, but I have never been an impulse buyer when it comes to books. CDs? DVDs? Show me some fetching cover art and I’ll snap them up without hesitation. But books are a bigger commitment. Experience teaches us that we can so easily choose badly, no matter how assiduously we do our research. Five people told me How to Be Good by Nick Hornby was a searing exploration of the true nature of altruism, but I found it so utterly dead inside that I unaltruistically threw the audio version onto the central reservation of the M11. As for the Booker list, the only thing I’ve learnt to trust about it is that everyone on it apart from Ian McEwan will be a lot more highfalutin than they are readable.

No, there really isn’t a fail-safe formula for choosing a novel. But I think I might have found the next best thing. In the past fortnight, I have read three fantastic books, each of obvious literary value and propelled by a thumping plot: one a strangely realistic love story with a time-travelling fantasy at its core, another a 19th-century murder-mystery for a cold winter’s night, another a spy novel that out-Le Carrés Le Carré. All very different in subject matter, they had one thing in common: they were recommended by Richard and Judy’s Book Club.

Initially, there is something a little disconcerting about having your reading tastes dictated by a pair of daytime television presenters who are best known for interviewing people about cake, celebrity and skin complaints, but there is no denying the sway Richard and Judy hold — and not just where the sales of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Trav- eller’s Wife, Andrew Taylor’s The American Boy and William Brodrick’s The Sixth Lamentation are concerned. At the time of writing, five of the top six books in the Waterstone’s chart carry the sticker marking the couple’s approval. Their endorsement has been of immeasurable help to Joseph O’Connor’s The Star of the Sea, which has seen a 350% increase in sales since being featured on the show, and to Bella Pollen’s Hunting Unicorns, which sold a comfortable 50,000 copies in the first 15 months after its publication, but a further 150,000 in the eight months since Richard and Judy recommended it.

In April, the BBC will launch its weekly rival show, Page Turners, hosted by Jeremy Vine, which, like the Wednesday book slot on Richard and Judy’s teatime Channel 4 show, will invite reading groups from around the country onto the programme to discuss a fiction or nonfiction title.

The rise of book clubs in the UK has been inexorable for half a decade. Almost every newspaper, radio station and village seems to have at least one. In recent weeks, the first internet reading group, www.bookgrouponline.com, was launched by Bill Matthews, the creator of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, with weekly discussion points and opportunities to interact with like-minded souls on every topic from the baffling popularity of Dan Brown to the autobiography of Peter Alliss.

So, why has reading suddenly become a communal experience? Is it because books, being so inclusive, stand up to lengthy discussion so much better than other art forms? Is it because book groups provide a good excuse to get together in a cut-off technological age? Or is it a sign of the public taking back literature from the Establishment? One of the reasons I find Richard and Judy so trustworthy is because of their obvious lack of a literary agenda. I am not fooling myself that they have hand-picked all the books on the lists on their own, but the way they present themselves as a “nobrow every-couple” (albeit an every- couple with a more public sex life than most) has an obvious appeal to any voracious reader who has felt intimidated by Newsnight Review or read the coded ramblings of a literary critic and felt that there is one crucial question missing — that of whether the book in question is entertaining.

When I joined my local village book group a couple of years ago, I was quickly put at ease for similar reasons. I had always felt there was a “proper” way to discuss books, one I had never been privy to, but it soon became apparent that I wasn’t alone. We all worried that our deepest thoughts on, say, The Cider House Rules by John Irving were weird, which is perhaps why they led us to such heated and diverse topics of conversation. I certainly couldn’t have imagined any other circumstances in my life that would have found me debating abortion with a pregnant housewife, two retired schoolteachers and a self-professed white witch.

Bookgrouponline, which has filled the reading-group-shaped hole in my life since I moved too far away to attend the village one, is, thus far, a little less explosive, although someone has already caused uproar by calling someone a “twit” for liking The Da Vinci Code. Me? I have settled for confessing to the motorway incident with How to Be Good and offering the opinion that the Richard and Judy list is now a better guide to good reading than the shortlists for the Booker and Whitbread prizes. I have had a couple of responses to the former post, both in tacit support. As for the latter, I felt sure someone out there would be taking issue with it, but, five days on, there is still no response. I wonder if that is a sign of the times.