Centre County Reads - CDT

Two authors will be visiting State College this month. First, Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, the 2009 Community Read book at Penn State, will be at the State Theatre on April 17th at 7:00 PM. If you read her book, I know you will be interested in hearing her take on what it all meant. This event is sponsored by the Penn State Center for American Literary Studies - http://www.cals.psu.edu. There is still one more public book group discussion before the author visit at 102 Kern Building on April 9, from 7-8 PM on the Penn State campus.

I was just reading an interesting interview with Marjane Satrapi about the movie version of Persepolis:    http://culturepulp.typepad.com/culturepulp/2008/01/the-culturepulp.html She talked about how one of her motivations for creating both the graphic novel and film versions of Persepolis was to personalize the people of Iran- to let the world know that they are real, individual people and not all America-hating fanatics.

Did you like Persepolis? What did you think about reading a graphic novel? How did you like the character of Marji? Has reading Persepolis changed what you think about the country of Iran?

Now is your chance to talk about Persepolis with other people in the community. Schlow, Bellefonte and Centre Hall Libraries are going to be having a bunch of book discussion groups so you’ll have lots of opportunities to attend one.

In the sequel to Persepolis (Persepolis 2), Marji goes to school in Vienna and begins to understand how being Iranian is really important to her identity. Even though she decides not to live in Iran, because she can not have the kind of life she wants there, she never forgets where she comes from.

What happens when a girl’s education is disrupted by war? 

This Sunday, 2 p.m. at Schlow Library, we will start our Centre County Reads programming for the book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. One of the topics in the book is how Marji’s school is affected by the changes in Iran: boys and girls are divided into separate classes, bilingual schools are outlawed, the teachers revise history depending on who is in power. Eventually her parents decide to send her away to a school in Vienna so that she can get a good education.