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Many thanks...

to all who submitted photos for our photo competition! Please, keep them coming. Feel free to email them to priestsaintjohnssylva@gmail.com or drop them in Mother Erin's hall folder by the main office. Our winning photograph was submitted by Paul Busick. Congrats, Paul!

Dru and Barry Russell Tend New Plants in St. John's Vegetable Garden

  St. John's Book Club

Hello, Everyone,
I have been busy reading books for our next adventure. I hope you are still on board, ready to read more novels by African American writers.

One of the things we talked about as we finished last fall is to space the meetings farther apart so that folks have time to read. So here is my proposal: We meet on the third Monday of the month, at 5:30 pm. We start in March and run through October, finishing in time for the holidays. That means we can read 8 books. Here are the ones I have chosen:

1. March 20 Passing, Nella Larsen

2. April 17 The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett

3. May 15 The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

4. June 19 The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.

5. July 17 Take My Hand, Dolen Perkens-Valdez

6. August 21 Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

7. September 18 Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

8. October 16 What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker, Damon Young

The space in between the pairs of books indicates that the books function as a unit. The protagonists in the first two novels, for instance, struggle with identifying as white, though they have some African American roots. The next two novels are based on slavery and the Civil War. The penultimate group focuses on justice issues, and both works are set in modern times. The last two focus on the plight of African American men. The last book is actually a collection of humorous essays which I haven't read yet, but comes highly recommended. For those of you who read Harlem Shuffle, you may recall the hilarious scene of Ray's cousin Freddie just wanting a sandwich in the middle of a race riot in Harlem. That seems to be the tone of Damon Young's narrator.

Anyway, please let me know if you are interested, To rope you in, I selected Passing as the first book, which is only 94 pages!! And if you have NetFlix, you can watch a dramatization of Passing. There are also videos on the web of the actresses playing the lead characters.