Book Discussion Group

A Celebration of Reading!
Read each selection & join staff members Wendy Wise or Michele Reinhart for a spirited discussion!
Last Wednesday of each month at 7 pm in the Conference Room:
March 31: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
In the early days of automobile travel, the nation was linked only loosely by a series of roadways leftover from horse-and-buggy days. As Americans became more and more mobile, a network of interstate highways began crisscrossing the country, and on March 2, 1925, the Joint Board on Interstate Highways was appointed to develop a system for numbering the routes and installing standardized road signs. In honor of the milestone that gave us U.S. 23 and U.S. 40 in the heart of our city, this month we'll be reading and discussing Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road.
For drivers today, GPS and turn-by-turn directions are becoming the norm. But what if that technology was suddenly unavailable? What if all of the road maps and atlases were destroyed? What if the road signs were stolen from every city street, township road, state route, and interstate highway?
And, oh yes, what if some unimaginable disaster had left the world a lifeless landscape of charcoal and ash, where the sun's heat and light could no longer penetrate the haze and the world was growing colder; where the soil and water could no longer sustain crops and the world was growing hungrier?
What, then, if you found yourself alone - but watched - on the Road?
In stark, straightforward prose, Cormac McCarthy brings to life a post-Apocalyptic hell on earth that seems at once impossible and inevitable.
Please check our online catalog for available copies of the book and join us for our discussion on the March 31.
April 28: On the Beach by Nevil Shute
May 26: Empire Falls by Richard Russo