Voyage Out

I love my book group. It’s a diverse bunch of incredible readers. We laugh, we think, and we argue! It’s a lot of fun. We’re BookPeople’s very own Voyage Out Book Group, and we read regional fiction, picking three titles from similar locales, then discussing those as a way to expand our literary chops, meanwhile creating a mini, imaginary vacation. Literary tourism without leaving Austin, this is why having a local bookstore is such an asset to our city.

We just finished our California trip. We didn’t get very far away from Los Angeles, but we still saw a lot. After, almost universally, loving Joan Didion, we fought about whether Salvador Plascencia is the future of American fiction, or the most pretentious writer since Norman Mailer, then we had an eye-opening, dynamic discussion about John Fante’s Ask the Dust in which most of us left the group with a different opinion about the novel than the one we came into the discussion with.

Now we move onto another location. We’ve gone through much of America, peeked at Africa, and made a couple stops in Asia, but we’ve never been to Europe. No more, because our next stop is France. We’ll start with J.M.G. Le Clezio’s first novel The Interrogation, then we’ll read Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and finally we’ll read Jean Cocteau’s The Holy Terrors.

The group is open, so please come out, join us, I think it’s time well spent. Here’s how: we meet the last Sunday of every month at 5pm at BookPeople (December is an exception because of Christmas, we’ll meet on January 2nd), you can get a hold of us by email at thevoyageoutbookgroup@gmail.com, or join our Facebook page, or just go to http://www.bookpeople.com and look at our calendar of events, last, but not least, you can come by the store, ask for me, Brian Contine, I’d love to talk to you about books. I’d also love to put a plug in for all the other book groups here at the store. I often get book envy when I see what the other groups are reading, and the number of groups the bookstore promotes allows everyone the chance to find one that fits their schedule. Please make it your New Years Resolution to attend at least one book group discussion in 2011. You’ll be happy you did.

–Brian Contine