Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston's life seemed full of up's and down's. Born in 1891 as the fifth child in a family of eight, she enjoyed the privileges of living in Eatonville, Florida, which was the first integrated all black community in the United States. Here, blacks were able to exist without the prejudices of the age and area. Zora, thusly, portrayed much of her characters and their outlooks from this vantage point.
Although a participant in the Harlem Renaissance, she later found disfavor for her portrayal of black dialects in her writings. As an anthropologist, she remained true to this recording and has preserved some of this language. Reading books such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, you feel the power of utilizing this language instead of changing it to the "proper" English form. The rhythm and flow is uninterrupted through Zora's pen in this manner.
She eventually found herself becoming a resident in St. Lucie County Welfare Home and later died of hypertensive heart disease.

The Official Word

Since this is the "official" blog for The Great Works Book Club, I thought I would clarify the changes/decisions that were voted upon last night.
By popular vote, we will continue to hold meetings at 6:30pm every third THURSDAY of the month. We will reevaluate our meeting time in May. So, if this doesn't work out the best for you, it will only be for a few months before we can change.
The next meeting will be February 18th at 6:30pm at Loretta's house. If you need directions, please email or call me. We will read and discuss Zora Neale Thurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It's a fairly short book, but get reading now so you have time to think about it and get ready for discussion!!

We have a little debate on the books for the next few months. Please talk to me about your preferences and questions!

Meeting Information

Our next book club meeting is just around the corner!! I hope you have enjoyed this month's selections and have some ideas and opinions to share.
There have been some changes to meeting times and such, but we still need to refine this so everyone has equal opportunity to make it to the meetings. In the meantime, our next meeting will be held at Jennifer's home on THURSDAY, January 21st, starting at 6:30pm (a half-hour earlier than it has been held). For further information, please remember to check the Facebook club page.
Until Thursday!!

Similarities

The future is always looked to with hope and expectation of technology and other advances. However, dystopian literature points out how good things can go drastically wrong (although The Giver isn't typically categorized as such, there are enough similarities to qualify it). There tend to be many similarities that authors put into their novels. The trash receptacles is one example. In both Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver (as well as other novels), there is a wonderful trash receptacle readily available to keep the society clean and orderly. This seems like a great concept and somehow you get the impression that this is the solution for our waste issue (go green!). Aside from the fact that burning actually releases toxins and other pollutants into the atmosphere, there are downfalls to such a simple system. Blindly, the civilians in Fahrenheit 451 promptly destroy materials without thinking, to the point that books have become prohibited. In a similar manner, the father in The Giver simply follows his directive and not only places but pushes the body of the infant into the receptacle. Although I am not promoting littering, it seems to be when the choice is removed, individuals no longer think about what they are doing. Habits are hard to break, but become impossible without thinking about it. The trash receptacle was created in response to littering and to break the bad habit of littering. Yet, the true issue would have been correcting the way people think about trash in the first place.
What other symbols and tools are repeated in the novels? Why? What are the pros and cons of each?