The traveling book club at Wadsworth High School, run by English teacher Brianne Pernod, has been meeting every Friday since the beginning of the second semester.

The members of the book club include sophomores Reese Gruver, Spencer Antro and Jack Ramsier, along with juniors Tetiana Palyvoda and Lexie James.

During each meeting, the school provides the club with snacks that go with the book they are reading.

So far, they have read the books “All but My Life” by Gerda Weissmann Klein and “Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi.

“All but My Life” follows the life of young Klein as she documents how she survived the Holocaust. She defies all odds and survives while expressing the sorrow of losing loved ones. They visited The Maltz Museum, Cleveland’s Holocaust museum, to correlate with this novel.

“It was a fun trip. We learned a lot about Jewish heritage in the area and how hate can affect everyone,” Gruver said.

Their most recently completed book, “Theo of Golden,” tells the story of a man who buys 92 paintings at a coffee shop called The Chalice and brings them to other people’s homes to create a sense of community.

Their themed snacks for this book were coffee and biscotti crackers. The coffee and biscotti loosely represent the drinks and pastries that The Chalice sells. For their trip to accompany the book, the group traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

The book club selects books outside of the Wadsworth community to learn more about the world, rather than focusing on our day-to-day lives, and to gain a deeper understanding of a specific topic.

“We picked the book based on what people were interested in, and we based our possible choices on the places we would be able to take a trip to,” Gruver said.

Gruver said that the next book they will be reading is “And The Mountains Echoed” by Khaled Hosseini. They do not know which snacks to pair with their reading, but they do know they want to go to either the Cleveland Mosque or a Refugee Center.

The goal was to read and finish one book per quarter, but they started at the beginning of the second semester. So far, they have finished two and plan to finish three by the end of the year.

Pernod is welcome to anyone joining, stating that so far, the readers who have joined have been very consistent in their pacing.

“I didn’t know what type of readers would join the book club, and everybody that has joined is an avid reader, so we can get through books quickly,” Pernod said. “We’ve been focused on a book throughout the month and then taking a trip at the end of that month.”