Greedy Reader Book Club
May 26, 2010
Do you love reading and a good conversation? Are you tired of people not understanding your allusions to literature? Yearning to be surrounded by like minds? Then join the Greedy Reader Book Club!
The Greedy Reader Book Club meets at 2 p.m. on the last Tuesday of every month – with the exception of December – in the library conference room (Y-233).
The book for July is The Bridge over San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.
From Booklist:
Few novels identify their basic plotline as succinctly and forthrightly as the opening line of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.” The novel’s conceit is this: a certain Brother Juniper was himself about to step out onto the bridge when it broke and subsequently witnessed the plunge of five people into the abyss below. Brother Juniper wonders if the tragedy happened according to a divine plan or was simply a random instance of misfortune. His curiosity leads him to investigate the lives of the five victims to prove that the bridge collapse and the resulting deaths were indeed divine intervention—that God intended for them to die then and there. But, of course, the point of the novel is that there is no commonality among them, other than the fact that they are all simply human, with their own frailties. Wilder ends his at-once urgent and serene novel with this haunting passage: “But soon we shall die and all memory of these five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The books read are chosen by club members. All faculty, students and staff are invited to attend.
For more information about the club:
- Ramona Miller-Ridlon or 381-3637
- Elizabeth Strickland or 395-5409
- Visit online – Greedy Reader Book Club
