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
Book List 2020
John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) – 6 February
Jack Kerouac, “0n the Road” (1953) – 19 March
Focus Questions
- How representative are Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and co. of the countercultural Beat Generation in America in the immediate post-war period? What social and moral conventions do they challenge?
- How would you characterise the lifestyle of Moriarty, in particular, and how do you account for the narrator’s idolisation of him?
- How are women generally depicted in the novel?
- Comment on some of the interesting aspects of immediate post-war American society Kerouac critiques as the gang travels around the nation. How is the final journey to Mexico portrayed?
- What has changed, if anything, since Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” in the gang’s understanding of the American Dream?
- To what extent would you consider this prototypal road and buddy novel equally a quest novel? Does Kerouac’s own self-confessed mystical bent receive an airing in the novel?
- How do you react to Kerouac’s experimental writing technique of “spontaneous prose”?
- Find examples of Kerouac’s literary virtuosity.
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Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) – 23 April
John Updike, “Rabbit, Run” (1960) – 4 June
Joseph Heller, “Catch-22” (1961) – 16 July
Norman Mailer, “The Executioner’s Song” (1979) – 27 August
Alice Walker, “The Colour Purple” (1982) – 1 October
Toni Morrison, “Home” (2012) – 12 November
Any enquiries: Alan Corkhill Email: a.corkhill127@gmail.com 045 012 7270