Audiobook Walking Club of Long Island expands literary adventures with book crawls

You’ve toured wineries, historic houses and foodie hot spots, but have you explored the book-lined aisles of Long Island and New York City's growing crop of independent bookstores with your fellow bibliophiles?

If you’re looking to slip into bed with a good read, the Audiobook Walking Club of Long Island offers a novel way to expand your literary horizons. This fall, for the first time, the club is sponsoring three days of bus trip tours — or crawls — to independent bookshops from Suffolk County to New York City. 

"The amount of bookstores or mobile bookstores popping up is amazing," says Sabita Kumar, the Nassau County-based club founder who’s organizing the bus trips. Kumar says she was also encouraged to branch out into bus trips by the increasing number of "Silent Book Clubs" she found in Google searches. She says these clubs offer "social events in every Long Island town where women meet once a month at a restaurant or a bar and spend half an hour ordering food and drinks and 45 minutes of silent reading time."

She adds, "I wanted to offer [readers] something a little bit more than that, with exercise and movement." 

The club’s first set of book crawls visiting eight Long Island stops, departed on Oct. 3 from Deer Park, Oyster Bay, Massapequa and Merrick, and another Nov. 7 from Deer Park and Farmingdale to Brooklyn, are sold out. But about 30 seats are left for the Manhattan Book Crawl on Dec. 12, Kumar says. 

The October Long Island crawl features 160 seats on four buses, each stopping at eight shops throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties. The Brooklyn trip, with 76 seats on two buses, stops at six bookshops throughout the borough. Books in a wide variety of genres, as well as accessories such as tote bags, branded merchandise and other book-related items, can be purchased at all of the shops. The Long Island bookstores are offering a 10% discount, Kumar says. Each crawl also features onboard literary and music trivia games, raffles and karaoke.

Kumar founded the club in May, inspired in part by events like BookCon, which is held in April at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, and the Bookstagram online community. Kumar, who has almost 1,600 Instagram followers, said that with spring beginning this year, she decided to start an outdoor walking club, leading groups listening to audiobooks on headphones.

She says about 16 to 20 people listened to their choice of audiobooks at the first walk at Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick. She also organizes audiobook walks at Hempstead Lake Park in West Hempstead, Eisenhower Park in East Meadow and other public spaces on Long Island.

Kumar says she decided to branch out to motorized book crawls after this year’s Independent Bookstore Day. During the annual event held on the last Saturday in April, "it rained, and I thought, what if we had a bus?" Kumar says.

The Manhattan crawl, aboard a 45-seat, Wi-Fi and electronic device charger equipped luxury coach bus, "is going to be more of a shopping spree" than her walking club meetups, Kumar says. The tour will visit four independent Manhattan bookstores, including McNally Jackson Books in SoHo and Rockefeller Center, Kumar says.

Between stops, book lovers "can talk about the book they love with the other fellow book lovers and buddy up on the bus," says Kayla McNamara, 36, of Franklin Square, a human capital management consultant and a fan of the dark romance and romantasy genres, who will be hosting the Manhattan crawl as well as the Brooklyn trip and one of the four Long Island tours.

The Manhattan-bound bus will also stop for lunch among the vendors at the Union Square Holiday Market and then head at dusk for photos at the Rockefeller Center holiday tree, Kumar says. It will return to Long Island around 7:30 p.m.

Each participant will receive "Blind Date with a Book" swag, including a wrapped book stuffed with stickers, pens, key chains, notebooks and "five dollars back," Kumar says.