Summer Book Menage: The Conclusion.
24 July 2009
Well, first off, I just wanted to thank everyone for joining in our Menage this time around. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the books and the questions and the discussion. I have emails in to both Michael Perry and Tom Bissell (Bissell is out of the country until August 3) with a couple of our questions, so if I hear back, I will post their answers here in the future. One bright side of the new world of book publishing and book marketing is that (this is my opinion, anyway) authors are very aware that book clubs can help sell books, so if you put "book club question" in your email subject line, I would imagine they're more into answering it.
That is not a dig at authors. I salute them for doing all the marketing and traveling and selling they have to do.
So now my thoughts to our next Menage. Does anyone have any ideas? Are we up for a fiction/nonfiction pairing again? If we were, I might suggest Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Bookshop, perhaps paired with a travel book? (Fitzgerald's novel is all about a town where everybody knows each other, while travel books are often about outsiders getitng to know a place, and might provide a neat contrast.) Or is there some nonfiction genre we still haven't tried? Nonfiction graphic novels? True Crime? Do let me know if you've got any ideas, and we'll take a vote before our next Menage. And have a great weekend, everybody.