The next Louisiana Inspired Book Club selection is "The Optimist's Daughter" by Eudora Welty. The virtual discussion will take place at 12:15 p.m. Dec. 10.
The book has also been selected as this year's Louisiana Book Festival's One Book One Festival selection, to be discussed at the festival on Nov. 2 on the State Capitol grounds.
Eudora Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer from Mississippi. She wrote about the South. Her novel "The Optimist's Daughter" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South.
This novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who grows up in Mississippi, moves away to Chicago and returns to New Orleans to take care of her dying father.
“'The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much,' Laurel thought,” Welty wrote.
After her father's death, Laurel travels to her hometown in Mississippi for her father's funeral. Alone in her old house, she finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself and her parents.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.