This month's book discussion will be about The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. This book is in the public domain, and you can read it online here. For detailed instructions about downloading this book and other Project Gutenberg titles to your e-reader, tablet, or phone, look here.  Join us on Zoom! Email hcethatsme AT gmail.com for more information. 

"The Way of All Flesh is one of the time-bombs of literature," said V. S. Pritchett. “One thinks of it lying in Samuel Butler’s desk for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family and with it the whole great pillared and balustraded edifice of the Victorian novel.”
   Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler’s death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler’s scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as “one of the summits of human achievement.”

The Great Books discussion is structured so that the evening’s selected reading is discussed in a think tank environment with the intention of gaining insight from other readers that one would not have by reading alone. The seminar facilitator asks questions of the participants about the reading selection and helps the discussion stay focused. Our main goal is to have fun and take many interpretations from the group in order to enjoy a greater understanding of a selected reading.

Discussions are open to everyone and free of charge.  For a list of past and future discussion books and to contact the group visit, http://mail.salticid.com/mailman/listinfo/forbes_great_books_salticid.com.

About the facilitator:

Hilary Caws-Elwitt has her BA in English & American Literature from Harvard, MLS from University of Arizona, and ran Susquehanna County Reads for its first 4 years. But mostly she loves reading and discussing the books!