The Novel Tea Book Club will meet on Thursday, April 26 at 2 pm to discuss The Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood–where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned–Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor–engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey–hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share

Books are available at the Library to borrow and for sale at Townie Books.

Are you tired of reading the same books and authors?

Do you want to playthe field but are too shy to try?

Then come “date” over 50 books in one night at “Speed Date with a Book,” on Thursday, April 26! (Even if you have a life partner, this event is for you… because what happens in the pages of a book, stay in the pages of a book!)

To set the scene, imagine yourself sitting at a table with a few other curious “daters.” A local bibliophile comes to your table. A bell rings and the bibliophile has 5 minutes to share 5 of their favorite books with you! Ding! The bell signals the end of the first 5 minutes. You catch your breath, but then a new bibliophile shows up at your table to try and seduce you with 5 more books in 5 more minutes! The cycle will repeat 5 times at each location. That’s right, you will get to hear about 25 books at the Library, and then we’ll mosey towards the Townie Books, where 5 different bibliophiles will each sell you on 5 of their favorite titles! 

After all this, we promise you’ll find someone new to take home and enjoy between the sheets!

“Speed Date with A Book” is a joint-event with Townie Books and the Crested Butte Library, it will start at 6:00 PM at the Crested Butte Library, and end around 7:30 PM Townie Books.

Call todayfor more information or to reserve your seat for the hottest ticket in town–970-349-6535 (CB Library) or 970-349-7545 (Townie Books)!

Ever wonder where the earliest pioneers of Gunnison are buried? Are they in the Gunnison Cemetery east of town? Or across the river near the Palisades? Gunnison native Bob Easterly has devoted the last three years answering that question and the result may surprise you. Bob got interested in the subject when he learned that the first cemetery was on a ranch that his grandfather Philip Easterly and father James Easterly owned back in the 1930s. That land is now part of the Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport. There were no records kept when the ground was first being used for burial purposes from 1876 until 1883. It was abandoned in favor of a new cemetery west of Gunnison.

In 1994 the original cemetery, named variously as Boulevard, was accidentally uncovered by an earth mover during a uranium mitigation project. After remediation in 1995, Boulevard once again slipped into oblivion. Bob will present the story at 4PM on Saturday, April 28 th at the Ann Zugelder Library in Gunnison.

Bob Easterly is a fourth generation Coloradoan, born in Gunnison. He is retired… from a career with two of Colorado’s pioneer financial institutions, a 30 year tour in the U.S. Naval Reserve and most recently working in disaster recovery. With retirement came the time and interest in genealogy and Southwestern Colorado history.

He is the immediate Past President of the Mount Evans Chapter, Sons of the American Revolution, a member of the Denver and Pikes Peak Posses of the Westerners and numerous historical and genealogical societies in Colorado and Pennsylvania. He is a volunteer at the History Research Center of the Douglas County Library in Castle Rock.