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Archive for November, 2006

Discussion Starters for A Prayer for the Dying

Posted in Uncategorized on November 24, 2006 | 1 Comment »

As I reflected on the book and some of the reviews and interviews I read about it, these are the questions that come to my mind. If anyone has more to add, please do. – Will
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as it’s epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time [...]

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Let the Discussion Continue (or begin)

Posted in A Canticle for Leibowitz, comments, discussion on November 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

Just because we have selected a new book for reading and discussion doesn’t mean that you can’t add to the discussion on A Canticle for Leibowitz. Just go to this post, and add your comments or questions. I hope to do just that over the next few days. I know that someone is [...]

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Our Book for November and December – A Prayer for the Dying

Posted in A Prayer for the Dying, Stewart O'Nan, discussion on November 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

After an email exchange or two, Julie and I have decided that our next book for discussion group is The Librarium discussion group is A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan.
I found this book to be both powerful and disturbing at the same time. Written in the second person, the novel puts [...]

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We are people who love to read and discuss books, and The Librarium is a web-based reading and discussion group. All that is required is for you to read the selected book and then add your comment(s) to the discussion. If you would like to suggest a book for future reading please click on the "Suggest a Book" tab, or if you would like to be added as an author for this blog, please use the contact form tab. We hope you will join us!

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Our Current Read – Into the Wild

From Amazon.com
"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer.
While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams."
Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.
From Publishers Weekly
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature.
Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.
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The Librarium

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Archive for November, 2006

Discussion Starters for A Prayer for the Dying

Let the Discussion Continue (or begin)

Our Book for November and December – A Prayer for the Dying

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