February Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our February Not Fiction Book Discussion, we are reading Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, tells us in his first chapter, "Here we come to the heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. . . . My imagination . . . requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." Thus his book is a memoir of a city as much as it is a memoir of a self, offering readers a lushly detailed cultural, social, political, and religious history of Istanbul as well as a startlingly honest portrait of this artist as a young man. Pamuk has enriched his text with evocative photographs of his family and the city, enhancing his presentation of the sensibility of huzun, or melancholy, he feels he shares with all Istanbullus as a result of living in this lost empire. Our discussion should be rich as we explore Pamuk's literary allusions, compare and contrast his memoir with Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, discuss the idea of a shared cultural sensibility, and share favorite passages, so we hope you will join us, either Tuesday, February 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street or here on the blog.

To hear an interview with Orhan Pamuk and learn more about Istanbul, visit this link to Public Radio International's program The World, which recently featured a week of programming about this city titled Istanbul: A Past and Future City.

Notes from January's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir with a question asked by book reviewer William Leith of the London Evening Standard: "Is this the most cheerful book I've ever read, or the saddest?" We all agreed that Bryson does a wonderful job of conveying the parallel currents of optimism and paranoia that defined the 1950s--the excitement of space travel and television and the fear of communist spies and nuclear war--and he also succeeds at evoking the hyperbolic enthusiasm of childhood and the nostalgia of adulthood.

We disagreed with critics who feel that Bryson is not much of a memoirist. We decided that some readers might not understand Bryson's purpose in writing this book--to recreate the feel of childhood in a particular time and place rather than to provide a psychological evaluation of himself and his family. Bryson confirmed his intentions in a September 2006 interview with Emma Brooks of the Guardian: "This is not a deeply analytical book. The points it makes are pretty obvious points. It is not a huge intellectual exercise. It's really just a book about what an interesting state childhood is and what an interesting and promising place the United States was 50 years ago and how I think it's kind of gone wrong. . . . I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family."

We all enjoyed reminiscing about our own childhoods, prompted by the humor and lyricism of passages such as this one: " . . . I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. . . . I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting--the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else's." However, just as Bryson's book strikes a balance between cheerful and sad, so we found ourselves drawn to reflect, just as Bryson does in his melancholy last lines, "What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid."

To view an animated VidLit clip of a passage from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, click here!

If you have read Bryson's memoir or simply want to reminisce about your childhood, we hope you will add your comments here. What passages of the book were humorous to you? What memories of your childhood did the book bring back for you?

January Not Fiction Book Discussion

We will open our 2008 Not Fiction Book Discussion with Bill Bryson's memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Unlike many recent memoirists who describe remarkably troubled childhoods, Bryson tells us that "My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal." He describes in vivid and humorous detail growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines, Iowa, capturing the optimism of America in that decade. His remarkably normal childhood led him to a writing career that has produced such best sellers as A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. Capturing the tone of Bryson's book, Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday says, "[Bryson's] mix of exquisite detail and inspired exaggeration all add up to truth with a capital T that rhymes with G that stands for out-loud guffaws." We hope you will be able to join us, either Tuesday, January 8 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Main Library on Calhoun Street or here on the blog, for what should be an entertaining discussion!

Not Fiction Book Discussion List for 2008

We are excited to post the list of titles for the 2008 Not Fiction Book Discussion! (By the way, we have changed the name of the discussion to match the name of the blog.) You can find them listed at the right under Upcoming Not Fiction Book Discussions. We hope you will join our conversations, either at Main Library in Meeting Room A at 7:00 p.m. on the dates listed, or here on the blog.

Happy reading!

Why do we read nonfiction?

After a year of reading and talking about nonfiction, I have discovered that I am at a stage in my reading life where I am more drawn to nonfiction than fiction. I especially enjoy memoirs as my own storehouse of experiences and desire to make sense of them grow with each passing year.

Tell us about your nonfiction reading: What kind of nonfiction do you like to read? Why do you read it? Remember that nonfiction is anything that is not fiction, so you can tell us about your passion for poetry or car repair manuals or cookbooks or history . . . the possibilites are nearly limitless.

Notes from November's Nonfiction Book Discussion

We ended our Nonfiction Book Discussion series for 2007 with an inspiring conversation about Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

It is to Kidder's great credit that we talked about Paul Farmer as a complex person whom we admire. We especially respect Farmer's passion and compassion, his ability to connect with people whose backgrounds are different from his own. His insistence upon continuing to treat individual patients in spite of (or perhaps because of) his travel and speaking obligations is a testiment to his commitment to the corporal mercies presented in Matthew 25. As Kidder describes his first impression of Farmer in an interview with BookBrowse.com, "here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy." We decided that what some readers see as Farmer's enormous personal sacrifices of time, money, and personal comfort are almost certainly not sacrifices to Farmer himself, that he is living his life exactly as he wants to live it, and that not doing the work he does on behalf of the poor would be the real sacrifice to him.

We also considered Kidder's use of a first person point of view in Mountains Beyond Mountains. We agreed that by including himself and his reactions to Farmer in the narrative, he served to legitimize our own complicated feelings about Farmer. Kidder confirms this intent in the same BookBrowse interview: "After I'd spent a lot of time with Farmer, I began to feel that altruism was plausible after all, indeed maybe even normal. But the sacrifices he's made aren't usual, and I knew that readers of my book would need an everyman, someone a lot less virtuous than Farmer, to testify, in effect, that this guy is for real, and someone who could register the occasional discomfort that anyone would feel in such a person's company."

And we had the special pleasure of hearing about the six months one of our discussion members had spent working as a physician with Doctors Without Borders in Malawi. She had been inspired by Farmer's example and Kidder's book to donate her time and talents to this cause, thus inspiring all of us and proving that one person really can make a difference, not only through his or her own actions but through example.

To learn more about Paul Farmer's nonprofit Partners in Health, visit http://www.pih.org/. The site includes a history of the organization, updates on its current activities, and a wonderful list of recommended reading about such topics as Haiti, Rwanda, HIV/AIDS, and Health and Human Rights.

We hope you will share your reactions to Mountains Beyond Mountains here on the blog as well as tell us your story: Have you ever been so inspired by a book that you felt moved to action? Perhaps you donated your time to a good cause . . . or you set off on a journey . . . or you found a new hobby . . . or you learned a new way of looking at life . . .

November Nonfiction Book Discussion

Tuesday, November 6 will be our last Nonfiction Book Discussion of 2007. We will be discussing Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, an inspiring portrait of public health physician and infectious disease specialist Paul Farmer and his nonprofit organization Partners in Health. Farmer's life calling, deeply rooted in liberation theology, is to provide effective health care as a basic human right to the world's poor. Kidder's account shows how one remarkable person can make a difference in solving world health problems. But what makes Kidder's book such a good read is that he creates a narrative that reveals the complexity of Farmer's character--his brilliance, his energy, his convictions, but also the unsettling personal sacrifices he is willing to make to realize his vision. We hope you will join us at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B of the Main Library to discuss this book that USA Today calls "an astonishing book that will leave you questioning your own life and political views."