Wednesday, December 31, 2014

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti is a meditation on the act of storytelling in both content and form.

Paterniti set out to tell the idyllic tale of an artisanal cheese from Spain, Páramo de Guzmán, "made with love" from an old family recipe. But what started out as a simple foodie travelogue became a memoir of Paterniti's decade-long quixotic search for Truth as he found himself enamored with its maker, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, and entangled in a blood feud between two old friends, even moving his young family to Spain and missing deadlines with his publisher. The Telling Room could be said to be a book about itself and how it was in danger of not being written. In an interview with his editor, Andy Ward, at longform.org, Paterniti explained the paralyzing significance that this cheese and its maker took on for him:
"The cheese symbolized the past, and the past's place in the present. And more. The deeper I fell into Ambrosio's story, the more I found myself in emotional and meta tangles. There was a betrayal, and a murder plot. Would Ambrosio kill his betrayer? Suddenly, the cheese stood in for love, but also for hate. It was mystical, and then became soul-less. It was about the promise of fame and riches, and then bankruptcy. It seemed to carry so much metaphoric weight it couldn't stand up under its own legend. . . . I went looking for an ideal that I thought existed, as if I were searching for the Fountain of Youth or something. . . . But then maybe I went looking for people a little like me, too, those who become lost, and then found again, in the most unexpected ways." 
While Paterniti could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had maintained a professional journalistic distance from his subject, the resulting book would have been very different. How would a more objective book about Ambrosio be different from the one Paterniti actually wrote? Have you ever started something dispassionately, perhaps as a job, that ultimately became very personal--and very complicated? Where you became part of the story?

The Telling Room mirrors in form Paterniti's experience of being "in emotional and meta tangles," lost and then found, through the inclusion of many footnotes, including one that reads, "I would soon find out that digression was a national pastime in Castile, that to get to the crux of any matter you had to listen for hours, weeks, months, years." How does the book recreate Paterniti's time in Ambrosio's telling room? And how does it embody Ambrosio's  concept of the "disability of memory," which he defines by saying "Everything is rushing forward, so I must go back"? What is the relationship between storytelling and memory?

Mike Paterniti, his wife, Sara Corbett, and Susan Conley, all writers, created a nonprofit in 2004 in Portland, Maine, called The Telling Room "dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers." Visit their website, www.tellingroom.org, to learn more about their programs and publications.

And join our discussion: Tuesday, January 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Not Fiction Book Discussion Titles for 2015

As we look forward to a new year of nonfiction reading, it is helpful to remember Mark Twain's explanation for why "true" stories can be so compelling: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." In 2015, we will read strange and wonderful stories about heroes and underdogs, adventures and misadventures, tales and their tellers. What is our relationship to the stories we are drawn to listen to and believe and to the stories we enact and tell? And what is our relationship to the shared act of listening and telling itself?

We hope you will join us--see the dates and titles posted on the right side of this page.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

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

If you enjoyed The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo, then you might also like these great classic road books suggested by our discussion group members: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; and Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.

In a conversation between Caputo and Leat Heat-Moon about travel and the genre of the road book published in the New York Times (July 11, 2013), Caputo said, "The road book is a peculiarly American genre. I don’t know of any Italian road books or British road books or French road books or Spanish road books. Maybe “Don Quixote” would qualify as a Spanish road book. Why do you think that is?" Least Heat-Moon replied, "My theory is it comes from the historic fact we are all from the other side of the planet. I know there are American Indian tribes that deny that, but I think archaeology and anthropology show that all of the so-called Native American tribes did indeed come from the Eastern Hemisphere. We’re all the descendants of travelers. And with the exception of people of African descent, virtually all of our ancestors came here wanting to find better territory. I think it’s genetic memory functioning — when life gets this way or that way, and we’re not really happy with it, what do we do? Put a kit bag over one shoulder and head out for the road because that’s where solutions might lie. Somewhere out there is an answer to why a life is as it is."

Monday, December 1, 2014

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

We began our virtual road trip through American history and culture this year with The Unwinding by George Packer, a montage of biographical sketches and cultural memes that Packer uses to describe the "unwinding" over the last three decades of the America most of us take for granted, "when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way." We will end our journey with The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo,  in which Caputo recounts his epic journey across the United States, with his wife, two dogs, and an Airstream trailer in tow, asking Americans "What holds us together?"

Over the years of his journalism career, Caputo has visited Barter Island off the coast of Alaska and has lived in Key West, Florida, and he says, "My thinking ran something like this: The Inupiat schoolkids here [in Alaska] pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children and grandchildren of Cuban immigrants on Key West, six thousand miles away. Native Americans and Cuban Americans on two islands as far apart as New York is from Moscow, yet in the same country. How remarkable. I felt then a heightened awareness of America's vastness and diversity. And a renewed appreciation for its cohesiveness. In an itinerant life, I'd traveled through more than fifty foreign countries. A lot of them, riven by centuries-old hatreds, all too often delaminated into ghastly ethnic and sectarian wars . . . .What a marvel that the huge United States, peopled by every race on Earth, remained united. What held it together?" In the course of his journey across America, Caputo sees evidence of the same unwindings that Packer describes. Yet at the end of it, he is more optimistic about our future than Packer seems to be, finding hope in what he calls our "dynamic disequilibrium," the tension of conflict between community and individualism.

What do you think? After our reading and discussion this year, what do you think unites us as a nation and a culture? What do you think threatens to tear us apart? In his Prologue, Packer suggests that unwindings of political, social, and cultural structures in our country are nothing new, that "Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Yet in an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, Packer says of this particular devolution, "What I see happening is not just cyclical, though, it feels like a real cultural shift where the value of the community, of what makes this a coherent society, has really been submerged." Do you agree with Packer that we have undergone an irreversible shift away from community? Or does community ultimately hold us together in spite of other changes in our legislative and cultural makeup? What, exactly, is community in a nation as diverse as ours?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.