Voyage Out… to Canada

Post By: Brian C.

The Voyage Out Book Group meets the last Sunday of every month to discuss a novel. We read in three to four month cycles based largely on geographic proximity. We’ve built regional cycles around Texas, Japan, India, The Balkans, Africa, etc. The group has been meeting for three and a half years, and is open to everyone, so please feel free to come by.

Most of us are pretty cowardly when it comes to the books we read. We pick our books based, largely, on recommendations, reviews, buzz, or blurbs. We don’t often look at something unknown and give it a shot. We don’t take bold literary chances. We kind of hedge our bets. That’s ok. I understand. I’m the same way.

This cowardly book reading is why when The Voyage Out chose the four books for its Canadian Quartet names like Munro and Atwood consistently popped up. These two giants have been predictably and deservedly well reviewed, and are primary examples of living canonical writers. We chose them for these very valid reasons, but then something exciting happened: we took a small leap and a big jump.

The small leap was Michael Crummey’s Galore. This is a book that two members of the group had read and loved. And despite the author not being a household name, and the book being published by the small, but brilliant Other Press, the group was willing to take the small leap into an unknown place. We were rewarded by Crummey’s fabulous novel. If Haruki Murakami and Cormac McCarthy got drunk one night and made love under the Canadian stars, Galore would be the product.

That small leap was then doubled by the group choosing a book and author that none of us had read or even heard of. This big jump had us fall into Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce. Boyden is a known author to our northern brethren, but lesser known here. And although the reviews were mixed in our group, I contend that it’s important for book groups to read books from completely new sources. When everybody comes to the book with little or no prior knowledge, it sets up a polyphonic discussion that helps utilize all the talent a book group has to offer. No one is the de facto “expert”, and no one has a preconceived notion of how the book is “supposed” to be read. It’s wonderful to try something new as a group.

As we move on to our fourth and last novel from Canada, we also move onto safer ground. We’ll be reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as our book for July. This is fine, too. We’ll probably have a few people come to the group who have read the book numerous times, a few who have read Atwood, but not this book, a few who have never read Atwood, and one or two who have never heard of Atwood. The discussion will be varied and interesting because of this. The Atwood discussion will certainly be different from the Boyden discussion, but neither will be deficient.

I’m not anti-canon, but I think we could better all of our book group experiences by choosing books we’ve never heard of, or new authors we don’t know yet. If you’re free on July 29th at 5, come by BookPeople and let me know what you think.