Book Club

Description: The Book Club meets every 6 weeks to discuss a current book for review. If you like to read and to talk about books this is for you – or you can just listen to what others have to say.  Give it a go.

Coordinator: Alan Corkhill

Day: See list below

Time: 9:30 am

Location: Shed

More Information

Please contact Alan to be put on the email distribution list for the Book Club.

Any enquiries: Alan Corkhill  Email: a.corkhill127@gmail.com 045 012 7270

Focus Questions

Cormac McCarthy, “The Road” (2006)


1. What are the key features of this road journey that differ from classic road novels/movies, e.g. Kerouac’s “On the Road”?
 
2. Are any clues dropped as to the causes of the catastrophe that has befallen humankind?
 
3. How does the father manage to maintain his son’s trust in a happy ending? Does the  delineation between “good” and “bad” guys help matters? if so, is it rooted in a particular set of values or religious beliefs?
 
4. What, in your view, are some of the most noteworthy examples of the man’s practical resourcefulness in the face of death by freezing or starvation?
 
5. To what extent do memories and dreams sustain the two?
 
6. Are there any hints that the man would refrain at any cost from cannibalism?
 
7. Do you think that the minimalist Hemingway-like dialogues in the novel correspond to the predicament in which father and son find themselves?
 
8. How do you interpret the boy’s ‘rescue’ at the end? Is it a stroke of good fortune and can the new family be trusted? 
 

Book List 2023

Cormac Mcarthy, “The Road” (2006)  [a dystopian tale of a father and son on a post-apocalyptic road journey by a Pulitzer Prize winner]    MARCH 30

Philip Kerr,  “Greeks Bearing Gifts” (2018) [a thriller by a prize-winning  British author about a Social Democrat German detective trying to weave a path through the nazification of the Berlin police force]   MAY 11

Damon Galgut, “In A Strange Room” (2010) [a novel by a Booker prize-winning Pretorian-born writer about a  post-Apartheid white man who drifts across Greece and Africa looking for meaning] JUNE 22

Elizabeth Gilbert, “The Signature of All Things” (2013) [an historical novel about a globetrotting female botanist in search of the mysteries of evolution by a prize-winning American author]  AUGUST 2 

 Anthony Doerr, “All the Light We Cannot See” (2014) [ a story by a Politzer prize-winning author about the intersecting lives of a blind French girl and a German boy in occupied France] SEPTEMBER 14

Jack Serong, “The Rules of Backyard Cricket” (2016) [a fictionalised true story about competitive sport, rivalry and assertive masculinity by a multiple-award winning Australian writer]  OCTOBER 19

Maggie O’Farrell, “Hamnet” (2020) [an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Shakespeare’s only son by a prize-winning Ulster author]  NOVEMBER 30