December Not Fiction Book Discussions

We end our year of discussions with a poignant memoir about journeys and the complicated and tender relationship between parents and children, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn, a literary critic and literature professor at Bard College, uses Homer's Odyssey in both theme and form to reflect upon his relationship with his father and to memorialize him after his death. Mendelsohn's narrative begins in the recent past, when his father, Jay, a retired research scientist, enrolls in his freshman Odyssey seminar and then, after the semester, the two of them take an Odyssey-themed cruise together. It also circles back in time to Mendelsohn's memories of his childhood and forward in time to his father's hospitalization after a serious fall. Like the Odyssey, Mendelsohn's memoir is "about a son who for a long time is unrecognized by and unrecognizable to his father, until late, very late, when they join together for a great adventure" and also "about a man in the middle of his life, a man who is, we must remember, a son as well as a father, and who at the end of this story falls down and weeps because he has confronted the spectacle of his father's old age." He is both Telemachus and Odysseus, and his memoir is the story of the great gift of spending the last year of his father's life getting to know him a little better.

What do you think? What does Mendelsohn come to understand about his father Jay? Would this understanding have been possible without the experience of reading and traveling together? Contemplate your own relationship with your parents: How well did you know or understand them when you were young? How well do you think you know and understand them now? What events and experiences led you to your current understanding of your parents and family dynamics? Another theme in both the Odyssey and Mendelsohn's An Odyssey is the power and importance of mentorship. What role do mentors play in our lives? How is it different from that of our parents? Who has served as a mentor in your life? Have you read the Odyssey? If so, how did Mendelsohn's critical explication and personal narrative impact your understanding of the epic? If not, do you think you will read it now? What is intriguing to you about it? How does Mendelsohn incorporate themes and techniques of the Odyssey into his own narrative?  Did you find it successful and enjoyable in all it tried to do? What, in your opinion, makes a work of literature a "classic"?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, then you might also like these books and movies:

• Bruder’s suggestions from her footnote on p. 160:
• Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
• Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

• Suggestions from discussion group members:
• Evicted by Matthew Desmond
• Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo
• The film Leave No Trace

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder explores the tension in American culture between the independence of the open road and the security of home. Bruder, a journalist who reports on subcultures and economic justice, profiles a growing community of transient older adults who, largely due to setbacks during the Great Recession, have taken to the road in RVs, vans, even modified sedans, traveling from one low-paying, physically challenging part-time job to another. They work as pickers and stowers at Amazon fulfillment centers in the months before Christmas, sugar beet harvesters in the late winter, and as maintenance crew at state parks and vendors at amusement parks in the summer. Lacking pension plans and facing retirement with gutted home values and savings accounts, they have eliminated the highest cost of living in the United States, paying for a fixed shelter, by making these vehicles their homes. The people she meets are generally optimistic and self-reliant, making the best of a difficult situation. One of the biggest obstacles they face is the stigma in our culture surrounding homelessness, making inhabiting their moveable homes an often illegal and always precarious situation.

What do you think?  Bruder compares these transient older adults to what biologists call "indicator species," organisms that signal disruptions in the larger ecosystem. What do these nomads and the jobs they find indicate about our economy and our culture? Bruder's book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. What do you think could be done to support the people she profiles? How do you account for the odd disconnect between the American love of the open road, the open-road narrative, and #vanlife and the stigma and punitive laws surrounding homelessness? How would you define freedom? And how would you define a home? Many of the nomads Bruder meets are strong and independent women. Did this surprise you? As Bruder notes, "the nomads I'd been interviewing for months were neither powerless victims nor carefree adventurers. The truth was more nuanced . . . " How would you describe the people Bruder meets? Did anything about them surprise you? Bruder makes the journalistic choice to embed herself in the nomads' lives, even doing very brief stints at some of their part-time jobs. What do you think of her decision to include herself in the narrative? Does it give us greater insight, or does it overshadow her subjects' stories? Bruder notes that retirement is a relatively recent concept. What do you think would constitute a "good" retirement?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, November 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 15, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

Autumn is the perfect time to enjoy a warm drink, a good book, and a cozy conversation! If you liked Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard, then you might also enjoy these other books recommended by our discussion group members:

• The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
• Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems by Lucia Perillo
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the first in a seasonal quartet of books, Seasonal Encyclopedia, addressed to his unborn daughter, contemplating the question, "What makes life worth living?" His answer is paying close attention to the ordinary things of our daily lives. "These astounding things, which you will soon encounter and see for yourself, are so easy to lose sight of, and there are almost as many ways of doing that as there are people. That is why I am writing this book for you. I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it." In these sixty brief essays, nothing is beneath his consideration: apples, teeth, piss, chewing gum, fever, autumn leaves, lice, Van Gogh, tin cans, vomit.

What do you think? Is the premise, that these essays are addressed to an unborn child who has never experienced the world outside her mother's womb, believable? Which essays surprised or delighted you? Which were not as interesting? Do the essays seems to be a random assortment of topics, or did you discern a theme? Does the book amount to more than the sum of its parts? How do you think Knausgaard's complicated relationship with his own father inform these essays to his unborn child? What view of the world "as it is, all around us, all the time" emerges from these essays? How do the illustrations fit into the narrative? Have you read any of Knausgaard's massive six-volume autofiction My Struggle, the sixth volume of which was just published in the United States in September? How do Autumn and the other three volumes in the quartet compare in scope, style, and interest to My Struggle?

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

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

If you liked You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie, then you might also enjoy these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• The Leaphorn and Chee novels about the Navajo tribal police by Tony Hillerman
• The Love Medicine and Justice series by Louise Erdrich
• Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
• Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo
• Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain
• Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie is a story of grief as complicated in form and content as the life it describes. Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, is the author of one of the most censored and yet beloved young adult novels in the United States, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, along with over twenty other books and films. Alexie says, "This book is a series of circles, sacred and profane." Repetitive and metaphorical in form and language, his narrative circles around his difficult relationship with his mother, his Native American heritage, his childhood of poverty and being bullied, his chronic health issues, his escape from the worst aspects of reservation life and his success as an author, and his deep need to belong and to be loved. Complicating any reading of Alexie's memoir even further is the fact that just months after its publication, a number of women authors, some of them Native American, accused him of using his fame and power in the publishing world to make sexual advances and inappropriate remarks over the years of his success. Alexie made a public apology and declined the American Library Association's 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His publisher, Little, Brown, has delayed the publication of the paperback edition of the book. He has posted an open letter on his website saying that he has stepped away from public life for a while.

What do you think? How do you read Alexie's memoir in light of these recent events, and these events in light of the memoir? Is it possible to read the book on its own terms without reference to the allegations? An important question of the #metoo movement is whether we should even patronize the work of an artist guilty of ethical misconduct. What do we learn about Lillian Alexie? About reservation life in the 20th century? About the "spiritual burden" of being the last generation fully immersed in Native American language and tradition? About the experience of being "a first-generation cultural immigrant to the United States"? About the ways in which trauma can be cultural, generational, and personal? About our own cultural blindspots and our own willingness to judge?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, September 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.