Book Club to meet Sept. 11; 'The Road' is topic

The public is invited to join fellow fiction aficionados at the next Ellis Memorial Library book club discussion.

The meeting will not be held until Tuesday, Sept. 11, but librarian Kathy Caldwell has announced the meeting now to give readers enough time to read the book.

"The Road", a 2007 Pulitzer Prize fiction-winning novel by Cormac Mc- Carthy, will be discussed.

A copy of the book may be reserved at the circulation desk of the library.

Joyce Williams of Ogallala, Neb., staying part-time in Port Aransas, has volunteered to lead the discussion.

The post-apocalyptic McCarthy masterpiece is described as, "A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing, just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food and each other.

"'The Road' is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, 'each the other's world entire', are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."