If not even the promise of free booze could drag you out to the, let’s say, acquired taste that is a book club, here’s a better plan:
Get yourself off terra firma and onto Adventure Canada’s Arctic-bound cruise ship, where everything seems like a better idea than it does on land.
Their first-ever “Floating Book Club,” sailing through Newfoundland and Labrador July 5 through 17 aboard the 198-passenger Ocean Endeavour, aims to sprout sea legs on bookworms.
The 13-day cruise is triply hosted by Canadian superstar authors Doug Gibson (who?), Kathleen Winter (say wha?) and Terry Fallis (oh, grow up). Not ringing any bells? They’re the ones who penned “Stories About Storytellers,” “Annabel” and “The Best Laid Plans,” respectively.
Still nothing? Well, the important thing to know is that these authors are smart, chatty, good-humored and engaging. So engage away.
Here’s the thing: You don’t even need to actually read their books if you don’t want to. Just breeze through their synopses and reviews on Amazon and you’ll be able to talk shop like a seasoned host of a ratings-challenged C-SPAN2 weekend show in no time.
But when you’re not discussing foreshadowing, flashbacks and faulty parallelism (ooh, and alliteration!) with your fellow bibliophiles, you’ll be out and about exploring the French-meets-First Nations-meets-Basque-meets-Viking-influenced culture of Newfoundland and its famed topographical porn, like the ancient geology of Gros Morne National Park and the first European settlement in North America, L’Anse aux Meadows (it was Norse — sorry not sorry, Columbus).
In Labrador, you’ll stumble across the tallest mountains east of the Rockies in daunting Torngat Mountains National Park and stroll through the Inuit ’hood of Nunatsiavut.
Nesting seabirds, whales, falcons, polar bears, seals and many other cold-weather, fjord-friendly critters will inevitably join you along the way.
The cost is $4,995 per person, not including commercial airfare and the $995/pp charter flights (St. John’s, Newfoundland, to the Frenchy-French, wine-and-cheesed island of Saint Pierre on July 5; Kuujjuaq, Quebec (née Fort Chimo), to Ottawa on July 17).
And just in case you fall overboard, remember that dangling modifiers make excellent flotation devices.