Our July book club will be The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a contemporary lit fic about Agnès, who receives the news that her childhood friend has died. She looks back on their lives, escaping the post-war French countryside and exchanging it for an English boardingschool and later rural America. I’ve heard good things about Yiyun Li and it’s been a while since we read something ‘not-weird’ so I’m looking forward to a change of pace! This will be our last book club before the big summer break. After The Book of Goose, we’ll be back in early October with a spooky novel!
Here are the important details:
We are meeting on the 5th of July at 20:00.
The book club is at Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring drinks (at least) for yourself.
Want to join? Email me at boredtodeathbookclub@gmail.com to reserve your seat. I will email you back with a confirmation. I only take email reservations because social media sign ups are a bit more uncertain.
The book club is free, but donations are welcome to help cover the location costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie.
Have ideas for the book club? I love to hear it!
What to read next if you enjoyed People from my Neighbourhood
The obvious recommendation is Hiromi Kawakami’s other novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, but plenty of her other work has also been translated. From those, I’d recommend Parade because it deals a bit more with Japanese folklore which we enjoyed in her short story collection. Sticking with Japanese fiction, Kōbō Abe feels like a must read if you like more weirdness. If you wantmore short stories then read The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya and if you were impressed with Ted Goossen’s translation skills, then try his translations of Murakami or of Monkey Business, the magazine that first published these stories.
People from my Neighbourhood Recap
For such a short book, we had quite a lot to talk about. It was fun to hear about everyone’s different reading experiences and to see the difference between people who read the book in one go or who slowly picked their way through it. The general vibe was that we enjoyed the book, enjoyed the weirdness of some of the stories and laughed a lot more than we expected to. We also had a fascinating discussion about magical realism and how it’s used in Latin America vs. Japan and the expectations we had while going into the collection. Most of us also felt like we didn’t know enough about Japanese culture and folklore to fully appreciate all the references in the texts, but that didn’t stop us from appreciating it. The stories were very short which made them easy to read, but maybe also a bit forgetable. With so many situations and characters it was sometimes hard to keep them all apart.
If you made it this far, then here’s a secret book recommendation for you. Thanks for reading!