The Voyage Out Book Group meets monthly at BookPeople. We focus on a specific region for three months in an attempt to get a better understanding of that place. Bookish tourism. We’ve traveled many places over the past year and a half. Notably, we’ve ventured just up the road to the American South, went down to South America, and crossed an ocean to take a peak at Africa. Just finishing up our journey through India, we have set our sights for a new locale- Japan. So far the trip has been a fun one, and there are plenty of spaces available on the bus, so come and see what we’ll discover in Japan.
The three books that we’ll read during our Japanese cycle are Kenzaburo Oe’s aptly named novel A Personal Matter, Haruki Murakami’s masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Yasunari Kawabata’s meditation on Japan’s most popular board game The Master of Go.
For us, selecting books is pretty unscientific, with the criteria being two pronged: is the book from the region, and is it something we’re excited about reading? If it fits in that box, we’ll put it on the roster. We like to read works from canonical writers like Cormac McCarthy, Eudora Welty, and Nadine Gordimer, introduce ourselves to lesser known writers like Alejo Carpentier and Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’O, while still keeping an eye on the next generation of literary giants like Oscar Casares and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Thus far, it’s been interesting how many times our random collecting strategy has created a list with an obvious direction. In the American South, we read the women, in South America we focused on history, we looked at modern India… etc. Now that we’ve landed in Tokyo, we’ll be sandwiching the world’s most popular Japanese writer between two Nobel Laureates. Will we focus on these authors’ combinations of the miraculous and the mundane, will we delve into Japanese Existentialism; will we hate all three books? I don’t know. We will learn something and have a lot of fun.
We meet the last Sunday of each month at 5pm (next meeting on March 28th).We love new people, and, except for Lindsey, we’re all very nice people. Stop by and check the group out.
–Brian Contine
BookPeople 
Howdy-
I’d like to attend your book club! I can’t come this time(since I haven’t read the book) but I’d like to attend the next meet-up. Is there anything I need to do in order to join? And, will the next book be Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”? (I’ve read his “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” and LOVED it!)
Thanks,
Elizabeth
Hi Elizabeth-
You don’t need to anything to join one of our book clubs except show up the day of the meeting. The next book for Voyage Out will be Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicles. There are copies available for sale now in our store or on our website and the book group will meet Sunday, April 25th at 5 PM. We hope to see you there!
-Elizabeth