Vicarious Reading Project

It’s the last day of 2017, the day when our minds turn to the year ahead – the skin we’ll shed, the boxes we’ll check, the people we’ll become. I’m an accomplished resolution-maker (write everyday! meal prep on Sundays! (re)learn how to drive!) but, historically, a bad resolution-keeper. So this year, I’m keeping it simple and focusing on just two things I want to do more of: reading and enlarging my world. I’m hoping to accomplish both with a new site feature that I've dubbed the Vicarious Reading Project.

The Vicarious Reading Project was borne from my husband’s observation that, when it comes to Read + Roam, my ambition is bigger than my bank account. To put it baldly – if I feel compelled to travel to a place every time I read a book set there, I’ll be poor faster than you can say ‘three week trip to South Africa.’

So instead of literally roaming everywhere I read, sometimes I’ll roam vicariously instead. For example, I might visit South America by reading Bel Canto, or touch down in Tokyo with Norwegian Wood. My plan is to travel through the written word by reading one book a month that’s set somewhere I’ve never been. Here’s my tentative list, pulled entirely from titles I already own:

Korea / Pachinko / Min Jin Lee

Barbados / The Polished Hoe / Austin Clarke 

Jamaica / A Brief History of Seven Killings / Marlon James

Ireland / Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / James Joyce

Afghanistan / And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

Zimbabwe / We Need New Names / NoViolet Bulawayo

Bosnia / The Cellist of Sarajevo / Steven Galloway

India / The White Tiger / Aravind Adiga

Russia / Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy

Vietnam / The Things They Carried / Tim O’Brien

Chile / The House of the Spirits / Isabel Allende

Norway / Out Stealing Horses / Per Petterson

And, given my resolution to enlarge my world through reading, the Vicarious Reading Project also has a real-world element – namely, a Brooklyn-based Book Club. I've been a book club member many times before, but never a book club leader, so this is a real 'going outside my comfort zone' situation. We’ll meet for the first time in January, and we’ll start with Pachinko, the novel Roxane Gay named her favorite book of 2017. We’re at 47 members (I can scarcely believe it - pinching myself!) and we keep growing by the day. If you’re in New York, please join us. And no matter where you are, Happy New Year! Talk to you next year.