Readalikes: If you enjoyed July's selection . . .

If you liked The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon, then you might enjoy these books and film suggested by our discussion group members: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder and Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, both nonfiction works that portray the precariousness of the immigrant experience; A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a novel by Anthony Marra that explores the difficult decisions people must make when caught up in war and the unexpected ways in which we are all connected; and Ida, a film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that portrays two women's search for identity and their efforts to reconcile with the past.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon offers us insight into the experience of being an immigrant in the United States, of remembering one's previous life and finding a place and a voice in a new country, a new language, a new but unsought life. Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia. He studied literature in college there, and he was a published writer by the age of 26. He was visiting the United States on a month-long journalist exchange program in 1992 when war erupted in Bosnia. He sought political asylum and did not return to Sarajevo until 1997. His parents and sister barely managed to immigrate to Canada, but his friends and their families suffered through imprisonment, extortion, and torture, while his mentor, a literature professor at the University of Sarajevo, was revealed to be a member of the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party and a collaborator with the war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Hemon worked variously as a kitchen worker, bicycle messenger, Greenpeace canvasser, bookstore clerk, and ESL instructor. He found community in chess cafes and soccer fields. He learned English by reading literature in English and within two years was published in the United States. His first marriage failed, and he and his second wife endured the devastating loss of their second child to cancer. These essays were originally written as independent pieces, and collectively they present a whole story of Hemon's life--or lives: in socialist Yugoslavia, in wartime Sarajevo, and in Chicago; as a child, a young adult, a married man, and a father. Yet these pieces serve as more than memoir; they are essays in the true sense, an attempt to understand being itself, how we come to be the people we are, how we define ourselves in relationship to others, how we integrate our interior and exterior experience of the world.

In our discussions we explored the motifs Hemon uses to integrate the essays and the evolution of his relationship to himself and to the world. We were deeply moved by his descriptions of life in a socialist country, of war, of the vibrant international immigrant communities of Chicago, of great personal disillusionment and loss. We also noted, however, that he pointedly refuses to give readers a comfortable resolution to the stories of his lives, insisting on the irreducible nature of his own experience. And yet, at the same time, by the very fact that he has written and published these stories, he insists that we try to understand. He says, " . . . the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination . . . is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves."

If you were unable to join our discussions on Tuesday, July 1, at Main Library at 6:30 p.m. and Thursday, July 17, at West Ashley Branch Library at 11:00 a.m., we hope you will do so here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked June's selection . . .

If you liked Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, then you might enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that grew out of Agee and Evans' trip to Alabama and the article that Fortune never published; and Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, who grew up poor in northeastern Alabama.