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

If you enjoyed Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride, then you might also like these suggestions from our discussion group members:

Films

• Muscle Shoals directed by Greg "Freddy" Camalier
• American Epic 3-part PBS television series about how ordinary American people were given the opportunity in the 1920s to make records, resulting in the preservation of American music folkways.
• Ray directed by Taylor Hackford, with Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles

Books

• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
• The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy and the film version Conrack

May's Not Fiction Book Discussions

Kill 'Em And Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride explores how the American South and the music industry shaped James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, and how Brown, a one-of-a-kind musician, performer, and self-made man, shaped American culture.

McBride, author of the modern classic memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, and an accomplished musician, hit the road to follow up on a lead that promised to reveal James Brown the man who had been hidden for all these years behind James Brown the myth. With a writing style and attitude reminiscent of tall tales and the funk music Brown helped to create, McBride follows this lead to disparate corners of American history and culture, exploring tensions between North and South, black and white, rich and poor. He says "Brown was a child of a country in hiding: America's South. . . . You cannot understand Brown without understanding that the land that produced him is a land of masks."

What do you think? Who was James Brown? How did his childhood in rural South Carolina help to shape the person he became--his music, his work ethic, his relationships? How did his experiences out in the larger cultural landscape of midcentury America continue his evolution--or, arguably, devolution? And how did Brown shape American culture, musically, politically, and otherwise? In the spirit of the tall tale, McBride incorporates his own experiences with Brown and his myth, from his own childhood in Queens to his career as a writer, musician, and mentor to inner city youth. How did McBride's experiences also help you to understand Brown and American culture?

Remind yourself of James Brown's magnetic charisma, knock-out musical and dancing talent, and tremendous work ethic at the YouTube Official James Brown Channel!

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

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

If you enjoyed Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members:


Fiction

• Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Nonfiction

• How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
• Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell

April's Not Fiction Book Discussions

The phrase "there's no place like home" can be read in two ways. The most common reading is positive, with the suggestion that home is the most satisfying place to be. However, one could also understand the phrase to suggest that there is no place to be found that feels like home.  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond  follows eight families in Milwaukee, WI, as they look for a place to call home and the obstacles they encounter along the way.

Desmond, a Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Genius grant recipient, spent time living in a trailer park where tenants were threatened with a mass eviction due to livability issues and in a rooming house in an urban neighborhood. He interviewed and observed the tenants and their landlords, as well as city and court officials, interweaving his own ethnographic research with statistics and studies of poverty in America. Desmond told Gillian B. White at The Atlantic,

I wanted to try to write a different poverty book, to focus on not just a place or a group of people, but a set of relationships. I thought eviction was the best way to do that. It brings landlords and judges and tenants together in this process that you can follow over time. I realized not only that we had overlooked this very central aspect of poverty, but eviction was coursing through the American city and acting as a cause, not just a condition of poverty.

Although eviction is the main topic Desmond explores, he shows us through the stories he tells that the lack of affordable housing intersects with many other social issues, such as parenting, education, employment, and addiction, as well as with race and gender. Desmond shows us with remarkable concision and empathy that these relationships are complicated.

What do you think? It is easy to judge people who get evicted as the victims of nothing but their own poor decisions. Did you feel this way before reading Evicted? Has your opinion changed after reading the book? How? Desmond uses storytelling to help us understand the larger issue of poverty and eviction. Whose story were you most drawn to and why? How do you see other social issues interacting with the lack of affordable housing in these people's lives? What responsibilities do you think landlords should have when renting their property? What risks do they take? Are profits justified in the private rental market when there is a significant lack of affordable housing? In his Epilogue, Desmond proposes solutions to the suffering caused by eviction. Do you believe that his solutions would work? Why or why not? Do you believe, as Desmond does, that access to a decent home is a basic human right? Did reading Evicted inspire you to want to help others in positions similar to those of the people in the book? If so, what do you think would help and how do you plan to get involved?

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

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

If you enjoyed In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri, then you might like these other books suggested by our discussion group members:

• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson
• When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins
• The essay To Speak is to Blunder by YiYun Li published in the January 2, 2017 issue
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
• The writings of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, both of whom wrote their masterworks in English, which was not their first language.

March Not Fiction Book Discussion

If Lab Girl is about science as a place, In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri is about language as a place. For her epigraph, Lahiri chose this quotation from Antonio Tabucchi: " . . . I needed a different language: a language that was a place of affection and reflection." A native speaker of Bengali and a well-awarded writer in English, Lahiri decided to immerse herself in Italian, moving her family to Rome and reading and writing exclusively in Italian for several years. This book is the result of her affection for that language and her reflections on her life as a writer.

Lahiri wrote it in Italian, and it is published with the English translation by Ann Goldstein on the facing page, so that readers can compare. While readers might expect a conventional travel memoir complete with rapturous descriptions of food and local color, Lahiri told Isaac Chotiner at Slate,

Everyone calls it a memoir. It's not. I've never thought of it as a memoir. It's a very different piece of writing. It came from a very different place. I was never, ever thinking of the book in those terms. I never even thought that it would be a book. When it was published in Italy last year, when it was published in Holland, in Sweden and France and other places, nobody has referred to it as a memoir. . . . When the book was published last year, I found myself talking in depth and at length about the language question. . . . The [question of whether] this is a transgressive act or not, and what it means, and the repercussions of this. There is, I think, a sort of philosophical aspect to the book, if you will. I feel that in all of the interviews I've done so far for the English edition, that has been skimmed if not totally ignored, and rather, it's more about, "What did your kids feel about going to Italy? What did your parents feel about your going to Italy? What was it like?" These more personal elements. I repeat, I don't feel that it is a memoir. It is an autobiographical work with two short stories in it as well, so it's a kind of weird mixed genre or out-of-genre kind of work.

Her language is spare and makes good use of metaphor, giving it the feel of a prose poem. She reflects on the relationship between language and a sense of belonging or exile. She considers the paradox of how her writing in Italian is both more autobiographical than her fiction about the Indian immigrant experience and yet more abstract. She asks the big question that all writers must consider at some point in their careers: "Why do I write?"

What do you think? Have you ever learned a new language and maybe even moved to a new country to live? Reflect on your experience. Did you feel a sense of exile, of being outside not just the language but also the culture? How did you cope? Explore some of the many metaphors Lahiri uses to convey her relationship to language and writing. Which did you find effective and enlightening? How would you define In Other Words? If it isn't a memoir, then what genre is it? Where would you look for it at a bookstore or library? Lahiri suggests that her book is more autobiographical because it is more abstract. How can this be true? What portrait of Lahiri emerges from her book? What is it about?

We hope you'll join the discussion: Tuesday, March 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, then you might like these books, television shows, and podcasts suggested by Jahren's publisher, Knopf, and our discussion group members:

Books
Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls
Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
Helen MacDonald, H Is for Hawk
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal
Rachel Swaby, Headstrong
Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
Louise Anderson Allen, A Bluestocking in Charleston: The Life and Career of Laura Bragg
Elizabeth A Watry, Women in Wonderland: Lives, Legends, and Legacies of Yellowstone National Park
Rachel Ignotofsky, Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Rachel Carson's life and works
Elizabeth Gilbert The Signature of All Things
Tracy Chevalier Remarkable Creatures


Television shows
PBS series The Botany of Desire based on the book by Michael Pollan
PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea written by Dayton Duncan and produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan

Podcasts
StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson