The Voyage Out – BookPeople’s New Book Club

One way BookPeople wants to be involved in the community is through hosting our [world famous?] book clubs; we want to connect people people from diverse backgrounds through our shared love of literature.  If you haven’t looked at the display of our various book clubs in the fiction section of the store, I’d encourage you to see if anything interests you, and even see if you can’t find one of the employees (like myself) to talk about a particular club.

And so I’d like to announce the start of a new club – The Voyage Out.  Brian Contine – a man of diverse and suspicious talents –  and myself are going to be hosting and leading discussion of books identified with a particular region.  Our first meeting is on November 30th at 5pm.  We will be looking at one particular southwestern state – TEXAS – and reading novels from various authors who live in the state.

Our first novel is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, an epic story set in Texas and Mexico in the middle of the 19th century.  Ever since its first printing in 1985, Blood Meridian has been discussed as one of the major American literary achievements of the 20th century, and literary critic Harold Bloom described it as “the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer.”

McCarthy has been pretty popular in the news lately – his book No Country for Old Men was made into an Academy-award winning film adaptation by the Coen bros., and his latest novel The Road won the Pulitzer, won Oprah’s heart (which is totally bizarre, really), and will be released as a movie in 2009.  But if you love these books, Blood Meridian is a different animal.  Instead of McCarthy’s stripped down and stretched out sentences of some of his novels, his work in Blood Meridian is packed full of analogies, allusions, and symbols that give the book a universally rich feeling for readers of all abilities and backgrounds.  Once you get into the book you will realize why it’s been called the Moby Dick of the 20th century by more than a few critics.

But why regional fiction?  Because good fiction isn’t formulaic or abstract.  The best writers write from their hometowns and adopted cities, from their urban spaces or their rural landscapes.  An author’s own experience, not an author’s ideas, leads to writing, and that experience is local.  So we’re going to take trips to these local places, starting with Texas.  We’ll be spending 3 months and as many books looking at Texas (and some of the surrounding regions), and then we’ll take a trip to the American South.  Following that, we might go to the American Northeast.  Or perhaps Italy and read some Calvino, or we might go to Eastern Europe to read some dissident literature.  We might not know where we’re going, but we look forward to the trip.

One more brief remark – we will probably spend three months on each area, and two books will be novels by fairly well-known authors.  The third book will be either a novel by a lesser known author, or a story not in a novel form.  So instead of reading a third novel from Eastern Europe, we might read one of Vaclav Havel’s plays.

Brian and I hope you come to the meeting.  We’re just starting up the Voyage Out and we’re excited about the possibilities to get to know some of our customers and fellow readers more.  We want to dive into the book into our discussions, and we are going to work to make that happen.

Recap: Blood Meridian/5pm – November 30/BookPeople’s 3rd Floor

Posted by Daniel