Not Fiction Book Discussions List for 2010

We are excited to announce the list of titles for our 2010 Not Fiction Book Discussions! We will begin with Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success, which will set the theme for the year's discussions. You can find a complete list of titles and dates on the right side of the page under Not Fiction Book Discussions 2010.

And don't miss the final Not Fiction Book Discussion of 2009! We will be discussing Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey at the West Ashley Branch on Thursday, December 17 at 11:00 a.m.

We hope you will join us, either in person or here on the blog.

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

Have you ever wished you could take a behind-the-scenes tour of a great museum? Then join us for a discussion of Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum!

Fortey, who was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, guides readers on a rambling walk through the museum's vast collections of fossils, jewels, rare plants, and exotic species, pulling open drawers full of orderly rows of specimens, wandering down seldom-used passageways, and poking around in the miscellany of the Dry Storeroom No. 1 of the title. He also introduces readers to the sometimes eccentric scientists who have devoted their professional lives to studying the museum's collections. Full of fascinating detail about such items as Charles Darwin's barnacle collection or the cursed amethyst of Edward Heron-Allen, and of humorous anecdotes such as the one about the time Fortey nearly set the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on fire, Fortey's tour is, according to the L.A. Times, "Worth the price of admission." Yet Fortey hopes to do more than entertain us; he hopes to persuade us of the essential role museums play in preserving our collective cultural memory and the diversity of life.

Join the conversation Tuesday, December 1 at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 17 at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes is a personal essay in the truest sense, both a literary composition on a single subject presenting the personal view of the author and an attempt or endeavor to understand that subject--in Barnes' case, mortality, especially his own. Identified as "a memoir" on the book jacket, the book combines unsentimental philosophical speculation on death with mordantly funny family stories and a consideration of the consolations of art. However, early on in the essay, Barnes notes, "This is not, by the way, 'my autobiography.' Nor am I 'in search of my parents.' . . . Part of what I am doing - which may seem unnecessary - is trying to work out how dead they are." He also confides, "Perhaps I should warn you (especially if you are a philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book will strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff. But then we are all amateurs in and of our own lives." So what, exactly, is this book about? In an interview with The Oxonian Review of Books, Barnes said, "I think of this book as an exercise in examining myself as a case and as an answer to a question: at this point in time, what does it mean not to believe in anything and yet not be reconciled to the notion that you're going to die?" In our discussions, we will consider what Barnes' answer seems to be and whether or not it seems to console him - and whether or not it consoles us. After all, one could read the title of Barnes' essay in two very different ways . . .

We hope you will join one of our discussions of the book that Men's Vogue has called, "that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die": Tuesday, November 3, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Kathleen Norris began her writing career as a poet, and after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, she lived in New York and associated with Andy Warhol and his circle. However, in 1974, she and her future husband traveled to Lemmon, South Dakota, after her grandmother's death and eventually settled there permanently. Although a married Protestant, she sought and found spiritual support at a Benedictine monastery near her new home. Norris' spiritual memoirs, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, have captured readers' attention and affection. These works blend essay and memoir with an examination of scholarly topics concerning spiritual life as well as a meditation on how these topics relate to Norris' personal life, transcending denomination and doctrine.

In Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life, Norris provides an in-depth history and discussion of acedia, a soul-weary indifference that she suggests is similar to, but distinct from, clinical depression, describing how it has manifested in her marriage to poet David Dwyer, her spiritual life, and her writing career. In our discussions, we will consider Norris' contention that this ancient concept and its remedies are especially relevant to the quality of our lives in the 21st century. We will also explore connections to other books we have read this year. For example, what connections can be made between Laurence Gonzales' "Rules of Adventure" in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why and Norris' suggestions for how to work with acedia? Do you think Chris McCandless' wandering across the country and his final, tragic journey to Alaska were a manifestation of acedia? What about Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying, and her family? Why didn't they succumb to acedia's temptations? And what about us? Can we rise to the complex challenges facing our global climate, culture, and economy using the suggestions offered by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World?

We hope you will join our discussions: Tuesday, October 6, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

Meanwhile, consider these quotations from the last chapter of Acedia & Me, a commonplace book of other writers' reflections on acedia, and how they resonate with the ideas of the authors we have read so far this year:

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase. --Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The Conquest of Happiness

Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?

Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history?

Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings? --Walker Percy (1916-1990) The Message in the Bottle

I'd say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land . . . the shoemakers who knew every villager's feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners . . . The meaning of life wasn't an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally, in their workshops, in their fields. . . . Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy . . . [which] has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time. --Milan Kundera (b. 1929) Identity

Just as the excellence of an individual life depends to a large extent on how free time is used, so the quality of a society hinges on what its members do in their leisure time. . . . We have seen that at the social as well as the individual level habits of leisure act as both effects and . . . causes. . . . When work turns into a boring routine and community responsibilities lose their meaning, it is likely that leisure will become increasingly more important. And if a society becomes too dependent on entertainment, it is likely that there will be less psychic energy left to cope creatively with the technological and economic challenges that will inevitably arise. --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (b. 1934) Finding Flow

West Ashley Branch Library September Book Discussion Date Changed

Please note that the date for the September Not Fiction Book Discussion of Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg at West Ashley Branch Library has been changed to Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. It was originally scheduled for Thursday, September 17.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

As summer comes to a close, we will consider mental illness and the way it can throw a family into crisis with Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, the story of the summer that Greenberg's fifteen-year-old daughter Sally was diagnosed with bipolar mania, "struck mad," as Greenberg says in the first line of this personal yet philosophical memoir.

In addition to the searingly honest portrayal of his own family's response to Sally's illness, including his experience taking a dose of Sally's medication so that he could better understand what she might be experiencing, Greenberg also describes the rich cast of characters at the Manhattan psychiatric ward where Sally spent much of that summer, including other patients and their families and the hospital doctors and staff. On his website, http://www.michaelgreenberg.org/, Greenberg describes his motivations for writing the book, suggesting that he felt it important to share the point of view of the family of a person who suffers from mental illness. He says, "I remembered the trepidation with which I started the book several years ago. I wrote about 60 pages and decided not to go on: it seemed gauche to reveal our lives in such a public manner. I put the pages away, but a year later removed them from their drawer and continued writing. It struck me that this book was missing from the rich literature of madness--a literature that begins with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy back in the early 17th century, and trots forward to Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, William Styron's Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind . . . Every one of these writers was describing his or her own experience of being psychotic. But apart from clinicians and specialists, very few have written about it from the other shore. There was a conspicuous gap in the literature, which I realized needed to be filled. For better or for worse, this is what I set out to do with Hurry Down Sunshine."

Greenberg also explores mental illness from a philosophical point of view, that of the self in crisis, the line between personality and pathology, inspiration and illness, and he raises questions about the way we as a culture view and respond to mental illness.

We hope you will join one of our discussions: Tuesday, September 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library (please note the date change--this discussion was originally scheduled for September 17); or here on the blog.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Last month, we discussed the life and "ordeal" of Elizabeth Marsh and what her experience revealed about the expanding world of the late 1700s; this month, we will consider the life of two late 20th century Haitian immigrants and their family and what their experience can tell us about our world today with the memoir Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat.

Danticat tells the story of her father, Mira, who immigrated with his wife to America, and her uncle, Joseph, who remained in Haiti until political unrest caused him to seek asylum in the United States. Danticat lived the first twelve years of her life with her uncle and then joined her father, mother, and siblings in America, so she sees both of these men as fathers. Unfortunately, she lost both of them in one year, Mira to pulmonary fibrosis and Joseph to ill health that was aggravated by improper treatment by American immigration authorities, the same year she became pregnant with her own daughter.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Danticat said that in Brother, I'm Dying she wants to present "a picture of my uncle, of what he meant to us, but also to link his cause to the greater cause of mistreatment and lack of medical care of immigrants in detention." Lyrical, clear, and restrained, Danticat's story gives us a picture of both global issues and personal grief. An interviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer said of this book, "If Brother, I'm Dying does not break your heart, you don't have one." We hope you will join our discussion, Tuesday, August 4, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library, Thursday, August 20, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library, or here on the blog.