Thursday, October 19 discussion moved to Earth Fare Café

Due to Tropical Storm Irma, the West Ashley Branch Library will remain closed until further notice. The Not Fiction Book Discussion scheduled at that branch for Thursday, October 19, 2017, will be held at the Earth Fare Café in the South Windermere Shopping Center at the regular meeting time of 11:00 a.m. We will be discussing Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey.

We hope you will join the discussion!

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Autumn has arrived, and with it, thoughts of Halloween and haunted houses. In Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, Colin Dickey asks, "how do we deal with stories about the dead and their ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed haunted?"

Dickey visited supposedly haunted places across America, including both private and public spaces. He delves into the factual history of these spaces, and he also explores the common tropes found in their ghost stories, using both popular culture and literary classics as examples, noting that "Ultimately, this book is about the relationship between place and story: how the two depend on each other and how they bring each other alive." He is not concerned with whether ghosts exist or not, but rather with human beings' persistent need to tell these stories and how the stories evolve as time passes. He cites Sigmund Freud's concept of the "uncanny," in which a place that is unsettling in any way becomes a container for the unsettled feelings we might have about events that have occurred there. Charleston, of course, has many old and, to some, uncanny places. Dickey visits the churchyard of the Unitarian Church and Magnolia Cemetery, helping us understand how ghost stories grew up around the transition from burial in centrally located churchyards to suburban garden cemeteries. Dickey also explores the real identity of Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee and the protagonist of his story The Gold Bug, set on Sullivan's Island.

What do you think? Whether or not you believe in ghosts, is there a place you have visited that felt uncanny to you? Can you explain its effect on you? Is there a place from your hometown that was rumored to be haunted? What are the historical facts and what are the ghost story tropes related to this place? Has the story shifted over time? As the American landscape changes with time, what spaces do you think will come to seem haunted? What ghost stories will we tell in the future? Why? Does Dickey's explanation of the relationship between place and story as the source of our ghost tales ring true to you? Why do you think we continue to tell these tales even as our ability to use technology to determine the facts of a situation evolve? We tell these stories at least in part as entertainment . . . why do we enjoy being scared?!

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 19, at 11:00 a.m. at Earth Fare Café in the South Windermere Shopping Center (the West Ashley Branch Library is closed until further notice due to damage from Tropical Storm Irma); and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, then you might also like these books and films suggested by our discussion group members:

Books

• The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
• House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid
• Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film by Glenn Kurtz
• The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Films

• Woman in Gold with Ryan Reynolds and Helen Mirren
• The Lives of Others with Martina Gedeck and Ulrich Muhe
• A Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire
• Night Crossing with John Hurt and Jane Alexander
• Triumph of the Will directed by Leni Reifenstahl

Thursday, September 21 discussion moved to Earth Fare cafe

Due to Hurricane Irma, the West Ashley Branch Library will remain closed until further notice. The Not Fiction Book Discussion scheduled at that branch for Thursday, September 21, 2017, will be held at the Earth Fare cafe at the regular meeting time of 11:00 a.m. We will be discussing The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History by Thomas Harding.

We hope you will join the discussion!

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History by Thomas Harding is the story of Harding's attempt to reclaim a family home in Germany lost during the Holocaust. Along with the house itself, Harding also recovers a century of history in the lives of five families who lived in the house through the First World War, the collapse of Imperial Germany, The Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, communism, the physical and political division of the Berlin Wall, and reunification.

Harding first visited his family's house by Gross Glienicke Lake in the suburbs of Berlin in 1993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He traveled there with his grandmother Elsie, who had loved the home built by her father, Alfred Alexander, Harding's great-grandfather, as "a soul place." The family lost the house when they fled Germany and Nazi persecution of Jewish people in the 1930s. Harding resolved to return to learn more about the house and its history, and in 2013 arrived to discover that the house was soon to be demolished. His efforts to preserve this modest house by the lake result in "the story of a building that was loved and lost by five families. A story of the everyday moments that make a house a home . . . It is also the story of Germany over a turbulent century. . . . Above all, it is a story of survival, one that has been pieced together from archival material and building plans, recently declassified documents, letters, diaries, photographs, and conversations with historians, architects, botanists, police chiefs and politicians, villagers, neighbours and, most importantly, its occupants." Ultimately, due to Harding's efforts, the house has been saved, and readers can follow its future at www.AlexanderHaus.org, the website for the nonprofit that will transform the property into a Centre for Education and Reconciliation.

What do you think? Do you live in an old house? Do you know about--or perhaps wonder about--its history? Does your family have a home, "a soul place," that is central to its history and identity? Harding uses a place, his family's house at Gross Glienicke Lake, to anchor a larger story about Germany over the last century of its history. What unique perspective on this complicated history does this focus on a single house provide? Of the many people who lived on the property and in the lake house, whose story was most interesting to you? Why? After returning to visit the house in 2013 and learning that the house is slated for demolition, Harding wonders not only if the house can be saved, but whether or not it should be saved. Is there value in preserving a modest structure like the Alexanders' house by the lake? How do you explain Harding's family's resistance to his desire to reclaim and restore the house? How do you think acknowledgement and reparation should be made to Jewish families who lost property and loved ones during the Holocaust? In his Epilogue, Harding says that "Whatever the outcome, The House by the Lake is a story of hope. It demonstrates that while we humans can experience terrible suffering, in time we are indeed able to exercise our capacity for healing. And if we manage that, a century of pain, joy, and dramatic change will have had a positive outcome. One thing is clear: a new chapter in the story has just begun. It will be fascinating to see what the next hundred years will bring." Are you as hopeful as Harding about the future?

We hope you will join the conversation: Tuesday, September 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations by Juliet Nicolson, then you might also enjoy these other books and television shows recommended by our discussion group members:

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson
Portrait of a Marriage Masterpiece drama with Janet McTeer, David Haig, and Cathryn Harrison
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
The Land, The Garden, and the Your Garden books by Vita Sackville-West
Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden by Virginia Nicolson and Quentin Bell
Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine Du Plessix Gray
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
Downtown Abbey Masterpiece television series
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates PBS television series

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations by Juliet Nicolson explores the nature of time and memory in the life of a family. It is a reflection on the experience of being a woman and a daughter. And it is an ode to place and the importance of a family home.

Juliet Nicolson presents what at first appears to be a straightforward chronological history of the women in her family, looking back to her great-great grandmother Pepita and forward to her own granddaughter Imogen. Nicolson, a descendant of an upper-class British family of writers and publishers that included Bloomsbury novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, notes that "The habit of writing down the story of our lives has long been a tradition in our family. . . . Having reached a middle point in my life when I began to find it as tempting to look backwards as forwards, I, too, wanted to explore those generations that preceded me." What she discovers is that the collective stories in a family may reveal complicated patterns and truths that can offer past generations forgiveness and future generations hope as they learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and find the courage to change.

Nicolson discovers patterns of dependence imposed by history on the lives of women, but also patterns more personal and familial. She documents a history of secrets, jealousy, fear of intimacy, lack of self-worth, addiction, and infidelity and how these behaviors are learned and repeated within the family. She also explores the nature of privilege and is curious "to see how they would respond to the charge of privilege. . . . I wondered if wealth and class always amounted to privilege in a broader sense." Throughout the generations, the solace of home, in the form of two great British houses, Knole and Sissinghurst, remains constant. Nicolson acknowledges the impossible task of the writer of memoir and history, that "In part, this book is an attempt to overcome the fugitive nature of time and, in many cases, the transitory nature of love."

What do you think? Considering how much has already been written about Nicolson's family, why did she want to write her own memoir? What does it add to the history of this family, class, and culture? Which of the women, and especially their mother-daughter relationships, did you find most interesting? And what about the men in these women's lives? What role did they play? To what extent were the unfortunate patterns in these women's lives the result of their time and place in history, and to what extent were they the result of their own personalities and choices? How did their wealth and class affect their lives? What is it like to be a daughter? Is it unique and different from being a son? What do Knole and Sissinghurst represent to the women who loved these great houses? Have you done any genealogical research about your family? If you were going to write a history and memoir about your family, what would you choose for your focus and organization?

We hope you will join the conversation: Tuesday, August 1, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.