Creating a Travel Book Club
How to travel and enjoy adventure without leaving your home.
Book clubs have become a popular activity for people of all ages to get together with friends socially and expand their minds at the same time. Travel book clubs are a great way for those who love adventure, new cultures, and new worlds to travel without taking time off from work, spending a lot of money, or packing. With each book, one can be transported to a distant land—and by discussing the book others, one can learn more about a specific culture and understand more than if reading alone.
Do you want the opportunity to travel without leaving your home? Consider joining or starting a travel book club.
Joining a Travel Book Club
Your opportunity to join a travel book club will most likely depend on where you live: larger cities are more likely to have book club opportunities. Explore book stores, libraries, colleges, churches, and community centers for book clubs—since you’re looking for a travel book club, don’t forget to also look at travel agencies and the visitor’s information board.
Opportunities are also available on-line—ranging from a Food & Drink Book Club on Barnes & Noble that covers non-fiction memoirs that address food, like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where members post their questions and thoughts in on-line forums to the Concentric Reading Circle that meets in a certain chat room at a specific time each month to discuss books about slow travel.
Starting a Book Club
If you will be starting your own book club, you have quite a few questions to answer:
· Where will you find members? How many will you have?
· Will there be one specific leader?
· How often will you meet?
· How will books be selected?
· Where will you meet?
Fortunately, many resources are available to help you answer those questions such as these articles:
Planning and Starting a Book Club
How to Start and Run a Book Club
Starting a Book Club: The Basics
Specific Travel Book Club Tips
You don’t just want to start any old book club, though—you want to start a travel book club, and there are a few things you can do set your book club apart:
Determine how books will be chosen. Although being in a travel book club is pretty specific, there are still many interpretations of travel and that needs to be determined before you start. Maybe each month will be a different country, but within one continent. Maybe each member can take turns selecting a book. Maybe you want to spend all year focusing on one specific country (and then do a group trip there, like Books Abroad traveling to India). Maybe you want to vary your reading between travel essay collections, memoirs, and fictional accounts.
Incorporate food. Anyone who travels will know that food and drink is an important part of exploration, so be sure to incorporate food into your book club plans. Do a pot luck of food from Italy when reading Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun, go to an Indian restaurant when reading The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, or have a wine tasting when reading Red, White, and Drunk All Over by Natalie MacLean.
Don’t forget the sights and sounds. If a member has visited the country mentioned in the book, ask them to create a slide show or share some of their favorite souvenirs. Borrow a video or CD from your local library and let the pictures and music play in the background of your meeting.
St. Augustine once said “the world is a book, those who do not travel read only one page;” by joining a travel book club, you’ll be able to do both.
A collection of travel books
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