First book selection was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.  A journey of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic America.

McCarthy was a student at UT and bought his typewriter on which all of his novels were written at a pawn shop on Magnolia.

Notes from Jeff Nichols:

I'd previously read in the newspaper about McCarthy being at UT and

buying his old, reliable typewriter on Magnolia Ave at a pawn shop

(News-Sentinel).  He's now a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

(computational sciences).  People there made fun of him using a

typewriter in a computer institute, until the day that the power went

out.  When the typewriter finally was irreparably broken, a colleague

from Santa Fe bought a replacement, matching typewriter for him on eBay

for like $10 and auctioned off his old one for charity at something like

$150K.  (I was off.  It was $254,500 for the typewriter.  Here's a picture:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/cormac-mccarthys-typewriter-dies-after-50-years-and-five-million-words/

)