Books in Real Life, Episode 12: The Wander Society

For this month's Books in Real Life we chose... The Wander Society by Keri Smith! It's a super interesting book that definitely appealed to our curious natures and love of wandering. Basically the author found mysterious handwritten notations in an old copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and felt compelled to look into it. What she discovered was a secret group called (you guessed it!).. The Wander Society. This book is about everything she uncovered during her research, such as who they are, where the group originated from and what their purpose is. But the part we loved was the section "Assignments/Research/Field Work". In it are a bunch of things to do to inspire you to wander freely and curiously. We decided to pick three for this post: Library Wandering (on my blog), Color Tracking (on Alexa's) and Wanderer's Filmography (on both). 

We had to improvise a bit for Library Wandering because silly us, we totally forgot that NYPL would be closed for Memorial weekend! Instead we went to Barnes & Noble and followed the author's instructions (minus the reading the book parts). 

1: "Find a book that interests you, and leave it on the shelves. Count seven books own from that one. Read that book."

The book I was interested in was Love Blind by Christa Desir and Jolene Perry and Alexa chose The Problem with Forever by Jennifer L. Armentrout. We counted seven books down and ended up at...

Both of which have future reading potential!

2: "Locate the first five blue books you see. Take those to a reading chair."

We took them to the nearest side table for a photoshoot.

3: "Find a favorite book of yours. Look in the bibliography. Pick a book listed there. Find that book and read it." 

Clearly, no bibliographies to be found here. 

4: "Ask the librarian what his or her favorite book is. Locate it and read it."

A sales associate asked us if we needed help and we said yes! She recommended this.

5: "Find an author with the same last name as you. Read the book. (If you can't find one, locate the closest name to it." 

Strangely enough, no Domingo! So we had to go with Alexa's last name.

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Survey time! At the end of every Books In Real Life post, we are going to answer a few questions:

Anything you wish you'd known beforehand? I wish we had realized that the library would be closed sooner instead of just the night before. I really wanted to go to NYPL!

What was your favorite part? Just walking around the city together being silly, taking these photographs and ending the morning with ice cream. 

Would we do it again? Books, NYC and taking pictures is something we do all the time. So definitely!

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But before you go, here's the video Alexa created for Wanderer's Filmography:

"Create a video based on... a movement, your feet, cracks, street signs, found shapes, secret locations."

Now head over to Alexa's blog to see what we did for Color Tracking!

Until next time! 

** Thank you Viking and Penguin Books for send us copies of The Wander Society **