~Post by Brian C.
Three years is a long time. Last month The Voyage Out Book Group turned three, and what a grand time it’s been. I want to personally thank everyone who’s ever showed up to the group, it’s been a pleasure reading with you. If you would allow me to pick out a few highlights from the treasure chest of memories. Blood Meridian was our first and possibly the best book we’ve read. A motley crew of around eight people came together to talk about a book that I had tried to read unsuccessfully four times, but the fifth time was the charm because I was being helped by some friends. We talked about Catholicism, dead baby trees, Texas, and sentence structure. We came away knowing more than we did when we arrived. I remember arguing with the group for 45 minutes about the last sentence of The Holy Terrors, we never came to a consensus, but I learned a lot about what it means to truly read a text. We hated Thiong’O, loved Casares, yelled about Coetzee, and fawned over Adichie, and what we got back was always worth the effort given. Some have been here the whole time, some showed up a little late, but made up for it with vigor, and some have stayed around for a couple stops, then left, but I’m grateful to have spent time with all of you.
The goal, from the beginning, has been the same: pick three books from a certain region and perform close readings of those texts for the purpose of discussion. At their best, our discussions focus specifically on the text, leaving out personal likes and dislikes, in order to find out what the book is actually doing, and how it’s doing it, as opposed to a less rigorous, this was good or this was bad personal reaction to a work. If you come to The Voyage Out Book Group, you won’t be asked a question like, “Did you like the dog in chapter four?” You’re more likely to be asked, “In chapter four, the author changes to a first person narrative, with a dog as the protagonist, and the punctuation became choppy and scattered, what does this choppiness do to the arc of the book? Why chapter four, as opposed to chapter one or chapter fifteen?” Many times, like with our discussion of Italo Cavino’s table of contents in Invisible Cities, we can’t figure something out, so we discuss, accept defeat, and move on. But sometimes, we figure something out, and it’s exhilarating. I think this approach has served us well.
Listed below are all the books we’ve tackled, including our upcoming non-region region, where we decided to just go crazy and pick any book we wanted to read. If you’ve been coming to our group, thank you, if you’re a past member who hasn’t been in a while, please come back, we miss you, and if you’ve never been before, please come check us out. We meet at 5pm on the final Sunday of every month, at BookPeople. I promise you it will be fun.
Listed from current & forthcoming titles to earlier titles:
Upcoming:
February 2012 – American Rust by Philip Meyer
January 2012 – The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
December 2011 – The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
November 2011 – 100 Bottles by Ena Lucia Portela
Past Titles:
October 2011 – The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
September 2011 – Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
August 2011 – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
July 2011 – The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
June 2011 – Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo
May 2011 – S. by Slavenka Drakulic
April 2011 – Snow by Orhan Pamuk
March 2011 – Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon
February 2011 – The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau
January 2011 – The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
December 2010 – The Interrogation by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio
November 2010 – Ask the Dust by John Fante
October 2010 – The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
September 2010 – Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
August 2010 – The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
July 2010 – Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
June 2010 – Rabbit, Run by John Updike
May 2010 – The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
April 2010 – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
March 2010 – A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe
February 2010 – Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
January 2010 – The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
December 2009 – The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
November 2009 – The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
October 2009 – Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
September 2009 – Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
August 2009 – Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
July 2009 – The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
June 2009 – Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende
May 2009 – The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
April 2009 – The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
March 2009 – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
February 2009 – Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
January 2009 – Brownsville by Oscar Casares
December 2008 – All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry
November 2008 – Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
BookPeople 