The Voyage Out Book Group has been meeting for quite a while. We are your basic book group in that we read a book a month and discuss it in an open forum—typically we read literary novels between 200 and 500 pages. What makes us a little different is that we choose three-month regions (mostly) based on a geographical location. Think of it as a little travel time through books and discussion.
Below you can see the whole history of the regions we’ve traveled to and the books that we read on those journeys.
We are going outside of our norms for our next region where we will be spending three months reading Literary Adaptations!
Here’s the plan:
- Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, October 28th, 2018 (an adaptation of Frankenstein)
- The Brothers K by David James Duncan, November 25th, 2018 (an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov)
- Snow White by Donald Barthelme, December 30th, 2018 (an adaptation from Snow White)
We meet at BookPeople the last Sunday of every month at 5pm.
Looking back on this decade of reading, here’s a list of quick thoughts from me:
The best books that we’ve read that might not be on everyone’s radar:
- Michael Crummey, Galore
- Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
- Carmen Boullosa, Texas
- Jackie Kay, Trumpet
Authors that are on everybody’s radar, but should be read anyway!
- Elena Ferrante
- Valeria Luiselli
- Eudora Welty
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Books that were super-duper hard:
- Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
- Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
- Jazz, Toni Morrison
The most liked regions:
- Japanese Lit (Oe, Murakami, Kawabata)
- Nigerian Lit (Cole, Adichie, Oyeyemi)
- Mexican Lit (Villalobos, Luiselli, Boullosa)
- The Jazz Trilogy by Toni Morrison
Most Notable Arguments:
- What constitutes the ‘Great American Novel’?
- Can we find Coetzee’s books to be reprehensible and brilliant simultaneously?
- Is it problematic for Eggers to fictionalize the stories he tells?
- While discussing White Tiger, who gets to claim to tell THE story of a place?
List of Regions and Books Read:
Texas
1. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
2. Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
3. Oscar Casares, Brownsville
Women of the American South
4. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
5. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
6. Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter
South America
7. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth
8. Isabel Allende, Ines of My Soul
9. Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Africa
10. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
11. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
12. Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Petals of Blood
13. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist
India
14. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
15. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
16. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Interpreter of Maladies
Japan
17. Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
18. Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
19. Yasunari Kawabata, Master of Go
New York
20. John Updike, Rabbit, Run
21. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
22. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
California
23. Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
24. Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
25. John Fante, Ask the Dust
France
26. JMC Le Clezio, The Interrogation
27. Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein
28. Jean Cocteau, Holy Terrors
The Balkans
29. Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man
30. Orhan Pamuk, Snow
31. Slavenka Drakulic, S.: A Novel of the Balkans
Italy
32. Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
33. Guissepe Di Lampedusa, The Leopard
34. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The Caribbean
35. Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls
36. Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones
37. Eva Lucia Portela, One Hundred Bottles
Non-Region Region
38. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
39. Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
40. Phillip Meyer, American Rust
41. Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity
Canada
42. Michael Crummey, Galore
43. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
44. Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce
45. Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
The New American South
46. Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
47. William Gay, Provinces of Night
48. Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
49. Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
Russia
50. Mikhail Bulgakov, Master and Margarita
51. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
52. Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Women of Contemporary England
53. Zadie Smith, NW
54. Pat Barker, Life Class
55. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Latin American Literature
56. Roberto Bolano, By Night in Chile
57. Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
58. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
The Great American Novel
59. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
60. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
61. Marilynn Robinson, Housekeeping
Off Shoot One Off
62. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
China
63. Mo Yan, Red Sorghum
64. Ha Jin, Waiting
65. Yiyun Li, The Vagrants
Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
67. The Crossing
Summer of Love, LGBT Edition
69. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
70. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas
71. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Scandinavian Lit
72. Knut Hamsun, Hunger
73. Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle
74. Haldor Laxness, The Fish Can Sing
Speculative Fiction
75. Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
76. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
77. Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas
Nigerian Lit
78. Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief
79. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
80. Helen Oyeyemi, Icarus Girl
Brit Lit Summer Love
81. DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
82. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
83. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Literature of Mexico
84. Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas
85. Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth
86. Carmen Boullosa, Texas
Weird Japan
87. Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes
88. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
89. Keizo Hino, Isle of Dreams
Native American Lit
90. Louise Erdrich, Round House
91. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
92. N Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Summer of Love Campus Edition
93. Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
94. Zadie Smith, On Beauty
95. John Williams, Stoner
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet Trilogy
98. Those Who Leave Those Who Stay
Ex Pat Literature
99. Paul Bowles, Spider’s House
100. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
101. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
Scottish Literature
102. Jackie Kay, Trumpet
102. James Kelman, How Late it Was, How Late
103. James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Mississippi Lit
104. William Faulkner, Absolom Absolom
105. Jamie Kornegay, Soil
106. Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Iberian Lit
107. Jose Saramago, All the Names
108. Carmen Laforet, Nada
109. Jose Marias, Infatuations
Toni Morrison’s Jazz Trilogy
110. Beloved
111. Jazz
112. Paradise
Lit of Los Angeles
113. Helena Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them
114. Viet Than Nguyen, The Sympathizer
115. Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Summer of Love French Edition
116. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
117. Marguerite Duras, North China Lover
118. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Literary Adaptations
119. Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad
120. David James Duncan, The Brothers K
121. Donald Barthelme, Snow White
—Brian C.
BookPeople 