Open Book Club is a group of people from Open Worship and First United Methodist Church of Denton who cares deeply about people, justice, and seek to find truth in literature. We are currently studying African American Literature with our co-facilitators, Pamela Sanders and Krystal Stroud and meeting on Zoom every other Monday night. You don't need any qualifications to be part of this group, just an open mind and a love of stories. We meet every other week to discuss what we've read and how it's impacted us. May we be transformed by these stories together!
Our next book will be The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead—a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Here’s a little about the book:
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for Black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
We read books together over 6 weeks, gathering every other Monday night at 8 pm to discuss on Zoom (we meet 3 times for each book). Our first meeting for this book will be April 5. At the first meeting, we'll be discussing the first four sections of The Underground Railroad (or pages 1-134). We look forward to gathering with you! Join our Facebook group to access Zoom links.