Pulitzer Project to include community during book club Tuesday

Published 8:12 am Monday, January 21, 2019

A month after beginning her journey into 100 years of award-winning literature, Leona Charleigh Holman has begun to incorporate the greater community into her Pulitzer Project.

On Tuesday, Jan. 22, Holman will host a book club of sorts, discussing one of the books she has read during the month of January: His Family.

“I want to discuss the themes and the style of the author, and how the theme can apply to our lives today,” Holman said.

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Holman said she has read three books, including His Family, since starting her project, and though that may not seem like a lot, she said each one was about 1,000 pages.

“I have two grandchildren and other obligations,” she said. “I chose to read the heavier books first so I could get them out of the way.”

She said her time reading all these literature classics has forced her to change the way she reads, as she simply does not have the time to delve deep into the mechanics of the writing like she normally wants.

“If I want to linger on something, I have to mark it somehow and move on. I will get back to that later on,” she said.

She said reading these books has become a form of self-education into how writing and storytelling works, and she hopes to give that same experience to others who come to the book club Tuesday.

“I have one foot in the mechanics and one in the storytelling,” Holman said. “I want my fingers to marinate in good writing.”

She said books like His Family offer insight into our daily lives, and she said they often shine a light on how people lived back then during significant periods of history.

In His Family, written in 1918, the main character talks about reading the history of Japan as a country and as a culture.

“Did the writer know, 30 years beforehand, about what would happen in World War II?” Holman said.

The book club will take place at 5:30 p.m. at the Elizabethton/Carter County Library on Sycamore St. Though she said it is her first time hosting something like this, Holman said she is excited to talk about what she has been reading with other people and seeing how different their perceptions of the same work are.