An Unusual Book Club

Maryland inmates read the classics.

Murray founded the book club in 2006 at the request of an inmate who told her that one of the hardest parts of being in prison was the intellectual deprivation.

In the past five years, book group members have plowed through some of the most demanding texts in the modern and classical canon. They've read Sophocles' "Antigone" and Shakespeare's "Othello." They've immersed themselves in works by William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

But, their response isn't only, or even primarily, intellectual. They also relate, at times emotionally and profoundly, to the women depicted in the pages they read.

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