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."

Notes from October's Nonfiction Book Discussion

In the first sentence of The Places In Between, Rory Stewart claims, "I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan." In our October 2 discussion, we agreed that his motivations were complex, but that that complexity is what makes this book such a pleasure to read. Stewart obviously enjoyed learning about the ancient and recent history and culture of Afghanistan. Yet his greatest incentive seems to have been to walk for walking's sake, to enjoy the movement and to embrace the adventure and peril he met along the way. Stewart does a remarkable job of blending historical and cultural anecdotes with unsentimental yet lyrical descriptions of his day to day experiences and emotions. He segues from descriptions of ancient Ghorid architectural aesthetics to explanations of how he treated his dysentery and narrowly avoided being murdered by Taliban soldiers. And after reading The Places In Between, especially chapters like "Blair and the Koran" and "@afghangov.org," we understand why nation-building in Afghanistan is such a complicated undertaking. Stewart does not rely on political grandstanding to make his points. Instead, he allows his portraits of the various geographical regions, ethnic groups, political factions, and Islamic sects in Afghanistan to accumulate and contrast with those of the well-meaning but shortsighted efforts of foreign administrators and aid workers to bring order to this country that has been at war with outside forces and with itself for over thirty years. Stewart's book offers so much to its readers--it is history, travelogue, meditation journal, political commentary, heroic quest, all in one gorgeous, harrowing read. To learn more about Stewart's efforts to preserve the art and culture of Afghanistan while providing economic opportunities through the nonprofit Turquoise Mountain Foundation, visit www.turquoisemountain.org.

We hope you will join us for our November 6 discussion, the last one of 2007, of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, an inspiring portrait of public health physician Dr. Paul Farmer.

Author Jeanette Walls to visit Porter-Gaud School

Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, will visit Porter-Gaud School in October. In addition to her work with the students, she will speak at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 3, in the Wendell Center on the campus of the Porter-Gaud School. The event is open to the public, and a book signing will follow. Walls' memoir was one of the most stimulating books for the Nonfiction Book Discussion this year! For more information, visit www.portergaud.edu.

October Nonfiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us Tuesday, October 2, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B at Main Library in downtown Charleston for a discussion of Rory Stewart's The Places In Between. Stewart's book is his account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, which was part of a longer walk through four other Asian countries, just months after the fall of the Taliban and the invasion by U.S. forces. He provides poetic snapshots of the people and places he encounters on his journey, interspersed with anecdotes from Afghanistan's ancient and recent history. He also teases the reader with his purpose--the first line of his book reads, "I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan"--which provides a perfect opening to a discussion of this book The New York Times Book Review calls "A striding, glorious book . . . A flat-out masterpiece."

Notes from September's Nonfiction Book Discussion

We have been very busy here at Charleston County Public Library with the Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment of the Arts designed to encourage literary reading and community discussion of great books! From September 9 to October 14, Charleston County Public Library and many partner organizations in the community are hosting a variety of events, from jazz performances to lectures to book discussions, all centered around the reading of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. To learn more about the novel, the author, and the calendar of Big Read events, visit the Charleston County Public Library website at http://www.ccpl.org/ and the Big Read website at http://www.neabigread.org/.

However, we did find time this month for a stimulating discussion of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. For those of us who had not read much about the history of al-Qaeda and the United States intelligence response to it prior to 9/11, the book provided an informative narrative overview with compelling portraits of major figures such as Osama bin Laden and FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill. Several members of our discussion recommended other titles that they felt provided more comprehensive coverage of this history, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind and Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll. And several members expressed disappointment that Wright's book did not give more coverage to the events and personalities of 9/11 itself. For the most part, however, we enjoyed Wright's use of what he calls horizontal and vertical reporting, that is, offering the perspective of as many people as he could interview while at the same time providing in-depth information from and profiles of people he interviewed on many different occasions.

Our next book, The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, will provide a nice contrast in style and perspective to The Looming Tower, yet will deepen our understanding of Afghanistan and political Islam.