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

If you liked Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by the author as inspirational to his writing process and by our discussion group members as informative or just plain good.

An interviewer for Barnes and Noble notes that “The New York Times Book Review . . . compared your memoir to The Tender Bar by J.R, Moehringer and Another Bull—Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. Were these books touchstones for you? What books helped you chart a path to writing a memoir?” St. Germain said, “They were. I have well-thumbed copies of both. I like and admire The Tender Bar — I can't drive by Camelback Mountain in Phoenix without thinking of a particularly great passage from it, which I won't spoil for those who haven't read it — but Nick Flynn's book was probably more of a touchstone, because I first read it before I'd set out to write a memoir, and it helped me understand the possibilities of the form. There were so many others: I must have read a hundred memoirs while I was writing mine. Some memoirs or memoir-ish books that come to mind as particularly influential: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of Didion's nonfiction, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, and, for obvious reasons, James Ellroy's memoir of his mother's murder, My Dark Places. But maybe the biggest single influence was In Cold Blood, a book you have to reckon with somehow if you're going to write about murder in America.”

Our readers suggested Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles and Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III.

And we suggest the September title, Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, another memoir of young men lost to violence and the grief of the loved ones they leave behind, because of an interesting connection between the two books and authors. In a Publishers Weekly feature article in which PW’s top 10 authors picked their favorite books of 2013, Jesmyn Ward chose Son of a Gun. She said, “I remember that time [just after 9/11] clearly: the whole nation was grieving. I had recently lost my brother, so I spent those days doubly reeling, as did Justin. I know this because Justin and I have talked about our respective experiences. We are bonded in our grief—and in our need to understand it more clearly through our writing. We are both novelists at heart, but we found ourselves compelled to tell these stories.”

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain takes on large subjects in American culture: gun violence, domestic violence, and the class divide.

St. Germain's mother Debbie was shot to death by her fifth husband, Ray, a former law enforcement officer, while the two were living, out of work and off the grid, in the desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona. Starting with these facts straight from a lurid but all-too-common headline, St. Germain introduces the reader to the independent, competent, complex woman who raised him. Debbie was a former Army paratrooper and small business owner who raised two sons as a single mother. St. Germain says, "She liked horses and men, but's that's not who she was." By telling the story of his life growing up with Debbie, his investigation into her murder, and his own journey through the stages of grief, St. Germain offers a moving tribute to his mother.

In addition to his personal story, St. Germain also tells the story of Tombstone and the mythic gunfight at the OK Corral, deflating the myth and showing how Wyatt Earp's "legacy leads straight to Ray, right down to the mustache and the badge and the belief that a man solves problems with violence." In her New York Times review of the book, Alexandra Fuller says that "St. Germain's bigger story, the one amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation, is about a place awash with guns and paranoia, where men and women toil at grueling, thankless jobs and make misguided alliances in a desperate attempt to defend against loneliness." In an interview with Barnes and Noble, St. Germain said, "I set out to tell my mother's story, but along the way I kept running into the unavoidable reality of how common stories like hers are in contemporary America. Which forced me to consider possible reasons for that . . . : our love affair with guns, the egregious and destabilizing class divide, and our acceptance of violence against women and violence more generally, especially as it relates to our ideas about masculinity. On one hand, I didn't feel qualified to tackle those issues directly, and was afraid that approach might overshadow the particular story I was trying t tell. On the other, I do hope her story sheds light on them, because while the blame falls properly on her murderer, those issues certainly contributed to her death, just like they contribute to so many other acts of violence."

Near the end of the book, St. Germain writes, "There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don't know why." Do you think St. Germain has found closure even without full understanding? Does it surprise you that he owns guns in his present life? What does the book's title say about masculinity in American culture? Is there a solution to gun violence and domestic violence in our country? We will consider these questions and more.

We hope you will join the discussion of this Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award Winner: Tuesday, August 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you liked The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon, then you might enjoy these books and film suggested by our discussion group members: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder and Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, both nonfiction works that portray the precariousness of the immigrant experience; A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a novel by Anthony Marra that explores the difficult decisions people must make when caught up in war and the unexpected ways in which we are all connected; and Ida, a film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that portrays two women's search for identity and their efforts to reconcile with the past.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon offers us insight into the experience of being an immigrant in the United States, of remembering one's previous life and finding a place and a voice in a new country, a new language, a new but unsought life. Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia. He studied literature in college there, and he was a published writer by the age of 26. He was visiting the United States on a month-long journalist exchange program in 1992 when war erupted in Bosnia. He sought political asylum and did not return to Sarajevo until 1997. His parents and sister barely managed to immigrate to Canada, but his friends and their families suffered through imprisonment, extortion, and torture, while his mentor, a literature professor at the University of Sarajevo, was revealed to be a member of the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party and a collaborator with the war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Hemon worked variously as a kitchen worker, bicycle messenger, Greenpeace canvasser, bookstore clerk, and ESL instructor. He found community in chess cafes and soccer fields. He learned English by reading literature in English and within two years was published in the United States. His first marriage failed, and he and his second wife endured the devastating loss of their second child to cancer. These essays were originally written as independent pieces, and collectively they present a whole story of Hemon's life--or lives: in socialist Yugoslavia, in wartime Sarajevo, and in Chicago; as a child, a young adult, a married man, and a father. Yet these pieces serve as more than memoir; they are essays in the true sense, an attempt to understand being itself, how we come to be the people we are, how we define ourselves in relationship to others, how we integrate our interior and exterior experience of the world.

In our discussions we explored the motifs Hemon uses to integrate the essays and the evolution of his relationship to himself and to the world. We were deeply moved by his descriptions of life in a socialist country, of war, of the vibrant international immigrant communities of Chicago, of great personal disillusionment and loss. We also noted, however, that he pointedly refuses to give readers a comfortable resolution to the stories of his lives, insisting on the irreducible nature of his own experience. And yet, at the same time, by the very fact that he has written and published these stories, he insists that we try to understand. He says, " . . . the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination . . . is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves."

If you were unable to join our discussions on Tuesday, July 1, at Main Library at 6:30 p.m. and Thursday, July 17, at West Ashley Branch Library at 11:00 a.m., we hope you will do so here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked June's selection . . .

If you liked Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, then you might enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that grew out of Agee and Evans' trip to Alabama and the article that Fortune never published; and Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, who grew up poor in northeastern Alabama.

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans is an interesting historical document for many reasons. Not only is an early example of experimental long-form reporting that was "new" well before New Journalism became a popular style in the 1960s; it also offers a contemporary portrait of the effects of the bust cycle that followed the boom of the 1920s we read about in last month's book, One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson.

Agee and Walker were sent by Fortune to Alabama in 1936 to write an article about tenant farmers for the magazine. Evans was at the time employed by the Farm Security Administration and took special leave to work with Agee. They spent a month in Hale County, living and working closely with the families whose lives they document. The article was never published, possibly because the section for which it was written, Life and Circumstance, was discontinued, or because the article would be financially and politically challenging for Fortune and its readers, although a definite reason has never been determined. The article was found in 2010 among his personal papers from his home in New York, which were donated by the James Agee Trust to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. Baffler Magazine, edited by John Summers, published a portion of the article in 2012, and Melville House published it in its entirety in 2013.

In his preface, Adam Haslett describes Cotton Tenants as " . . . a kind of morally indignant anthropology. An ethnography delivered from the pulpit." How would you describe the book? What is its genre? What role do Evans' photographs serve in Cotton Tenants? Is their message and purpose the same as Agee's text--in other words, do they merely illustrate his text? Or do they make an argument in and of themselves? Do you feel that Cotton Tenants is a good document of the tenant farming system? Although Agee and Evans' purpose was to call attention to their readers' blind spots and prejudices about the socioeconomic and cultural reality of the extreme poverty inherent in the tenant farming system, are they guilty of their own blind spots and prejudices, especially by today's standards? What connections, both in subject and in form, do you see between other books we have read in our discussions, such as The Unwinding by George Packer, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and Boomerrang by Michael Lewis? We will consider these questions and more . . .

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you liked Bill Bryson's One Summer: America 1927, then you might also enjoy these books and documentaries suggested by our discussion group members: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerarld; the recent film version of the novel directed by Baz Luhrmann and with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby; Ken Burns' documentaries Prohibition and Baseball; and the American Experience documentary Lindbergh.