The Booklovers Club, founded in 1899 and still meeting monthly, the Tuesday Club, the As You Like It Book Club – Davidson has a long history of readers gathering to talk about their favorite novels. It’s hard to imagine a town having more book clubs per capita than this one. Cristina Shaul (left), a newcomer on the Davidson reading scene, is hoping to harness all that college town bookishness into a community event called DavidsonREADS. It launches Friday with “The Bridge” by Doug Marlette, a novel set in the Piedmont textile mills.

With DavidsonREADS, Ms. Shaul hopes to get Davidson reading, thinking and talking about the same book. In the process, she hopes readers will bring one pumpkin-carving scene from the novel to life on the Village Green, and perhaps pay more attention to Davidson’s own somewhat neglected mill history.

PERFECT TOWN FOR A GOOD READ

Ms. Shaul moved two years ago to Davidson with husband, Matt, and their son, James, now a student at Davidson Elementary. The Shauls relocated from Newtown, Conn., which had sponsored a community reading project that Cristina participated in.

“It was a revolutionary war book, which fit that area,” she said. “It was fun to all be reading the same thing.”

As she settled in to her new life in Davidson, Ms. Shaul decided that she was living in another perfect town for community reading. She just needed to get things rolling – or rather, reading.

“My idea was to bring a book alive and involve different kinds of people in it,” she said.

She first approached the Davidson Public Library, which directed her to the town’s Parks & Recreation Department, the place for putting together community classes and events.

“They said ‘go for it!'” Ms. Shaul said.

By the spring, Ms. Shaul had formed a book selection committee (consisting of representatives from the library, Main Street Books, the Parks and Recreation department and also Davidson College student Christie Mason), but she already had a book in mind.

“Once I read ‘The Bridge,’ I really pushed for it,” she said. “It has so many different dimensions that we could use. I firmly felt that the first book should pertain to North Carolina.”

“The Bridge,” is set in the Piedmont and mentions Charlotte. It also revolves around the state’s mill history, another link to Davidson, which has a restored cotton mill on Griffith Street that dates to 1903.

However, shortly after the committee agreed on selecting “The Bridge,” Ms. Shaul learned that the book’s author, Doug Marlette, had died July 10 in a car crash in Mississippi. She said the news was devastating since she felt that she knew Mr. Marlette after reading so much about him. She had even been hoping to bring Mr. Marlette to Davidson for the community reading program. Ms. Shaul still keeps a copy of his obituary in her files.

THE BOOK

“The Bridge” tells the story of Pickard Cantrell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist in New York City who suddenly finds himself without a job and heading back to his hometown in North Carolina. Back in “Eno,” a fictional town in Alamance County between Greensboro and Chapel Hill, Pick has to confront his difficult relatives and his cantankerous grandmother, Mama Lucy.

The first section of the book sets the stage and involves Pick in a seemingly endless stream of fist fights and testy arguments. Once Pick begins to learn about his grandmother’s involvement in the unionizing battles of the 1930s, the book picks up steam and becomes engrossing. The Bridge turns into a duet between Pick and Mama Lucy, moving between her memories of being caught up in a bloody event that almost crushed her family and his struggle to reconcile his bitter childhood memories with his grandmother’s courageous role in the textile strikes.

The book fictionalizes actual historical events in 1934, including the uprising at the Pioneer plant in Burlington, N.C., and a massacre of strikers at Honea Path, S.C. “The Bridge” is also semi-autobiographical, as Mr. Marlette’s family members were involved in those strikes (the book is dedicated to his grandmother, Grace Pickard Marlette) and he was, like the novel’s Pick Cantrell, a cartoonist with a Pulitzer. A Greensboro native, Mr. Marlette served as a cartoonist for the Charlotte Observer for 15 years, winning the Pulitzer in 1988 in part for his skewering of the demise of Jim Bakker and PTL ministries (click here to view his Pulitzer portfolio). Mr. Marlette worked at New York Newsday during the 1990s, and his Newsday cartoon of the pope (see above) features prominently in chapter one of “The Bridge.” The novel, Mr. Marlette’s first, was published in 2001 and was voted “Best Book of the Year for Fiction” by the Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) in 2002. A second novel, “Magic Time,” was set in Mississippi and published in 2006.

PUMPKIN CARVING

DavidsonREADS is ready to get the town engrossed in “The Bridge.” The project has a steering committee headed by Ms. Shaul with members: Jan Blodgett, Dana Baker, Lee Cooper, Wendy Matthews and Christie Mason. DavidsonREADS is a partnership between the Parks and Recreation department, Main Street Books and the Davidson Public Library.

The project will officially launch Friday at the town’s “BBQ, Blanket and Bluegrass” event at the Historic Beaver Dam, where copies of the book will be sold and a cake will be served in honor of Mama Lucy’s 90th birthday – corresponding to a scene near the beginning of “The Bridge.”

Other events planned include:

• Thursday, Oct. 11, 7 p.m. – “Comic Strips in American Culture,” a lecture at Davidson College by Dr. Kathie Turner, a professor of communication studies.
• Wednesday, Oct. 31 – starting at 3 p.m. – Bring your pumpkins to the green. This corresponds to a scene on “Chicken Bridge,” which is featured on the book’s cover. The fictional town of “Eno” held an annual pumpkin carving festival, stacking glowing creations on the bridge railings. DavidsonREADS will tie into that with a town display of carved Jack-o-lanterns. Ms. Shaul said 60 pumpkins will be brought to the Ada Jenkins Center for carving and then lit on the village green, and she invites the entire town to add to the display.
• Monday, Nov. 5, 7 p.m. – public discussion of the novel to be held at the Davidson Public Library and led by Davidson professor emeritus Tony Abbott.
• Wednesday, Nov. 7, 10 a.m. – a daytime public discussion session, also to be held at the library.
• Sunday, Nov. 18 – Exhibit and panel on the mill history of Davidson, led by Davidson College Archivist Jan Blodgett and sponsored by the Davidson Historical Society.

Main Street Books will have copies of “The Bridge” on sale at a 10-percent discount.

Ms. Shaul hopes that DavidsonREADS will become an annual event, and she has a few ideas in mind for future community reads. In the meantime, she hopes Davidson readers will pick up “The Bridge” this fall.

“We’re really trying to get people involved in all the different aspect of this book,” she explained. “We hope they start talking about it with their friends and their families. We want them to take this book and pull it apart and really think about it.”