Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Aug. 7, 2021 in a hybrid set-up! Six of us met in person at the Wilson Library, after sixteen months of only meeting virtually. Two of our book club members opted to meet over Zoom. The Branch Manager at Wilson graciously set us up with a big screen so that we could see and hear Nancy and Sarah clearly, and they could see us.   We discussed Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar.   Nine-year-old Anton was left in a hot apartment with no air condition and no food for seven days during a heat wave in 1991. His mother only meant to stay out for a short while, but her drug dealer held her captive, forcing her to perform sexual acts as a way to pay off her drug debt. The police discovered Anton walking along the street all bloody from breaking out of the apartment’s first floor window. Anton’s mother had locked the door from the outside, for his protection.     A well-connected and powerful judge adopted...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower , a science fiction novel written in 1993. The setting for the novel begins in 2014 when the main character, Lauren Olemina is only 15 years old. She and her family live in a walled community surrounded by horrors going on right outside of her neighborhood that eventually spill in.   Although Lauren’s dad is a Baptist minister, Lauren creates a religion called Earthseed that becomes her guiding principal. She wrote a Bible called Earthseed: The Books of the Living. All that you touch You Change All that you Change Changes you. The Only Lasting Truth is Change. God Is Change. When forced to travel by foot from Southern California to Northern California, Lauren becomes a leader of a small group traveling with her. She also suffers a condition called “hyperempathy” which makes her feel the physical pain of others. All of us in our discus...

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana parrish where the people live on the same plantations that they had lived as slaves one hundred years before. The setting is 1948. The main characters are Jefferson, who gets sentenced to the electric chair, Grant Wiggins, the teacher who wishes he could escape from the parish, Reverend Ambrose, Grant's Aunt (Tante Lou), and Jefferson's godmother (Miss Emma), who convinces Grant to visit her godson in jail and to make a man out of him before he dies. Another character in the book is Vivian, a married (but working on a divorce) teacher who Grant loves. The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Feb. 22 with a discussion of this work by Ernest J. Gaines. We began the meeting by watching an eight minute video segment of Mr. Gaines being interviewed for the National Endowment for the Arts. There were sixteen of us, men and women, Black and white. A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 and won t...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with a conversation about the book Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time and Mine . We met on Saturday Jan. 11 and again on Monday Jan. 13. This was our first time having the same book discussion on the Monday after for those who couldn't make it on Saturday. The book is a collection of 12 essays written during the course of many years that have recently been published together as a loosely comprised memoir. The book begins with the author being stabbed in 1994 and all the health problems that have been the result of the stabbing. She, along with six others in a coffee shop, was randomly attacked by a stranger. Over the years since this incident, the author has attempted to tell the story of race, specifically how the stabbing of a Black woman by a white man can be used as a metaphor for the violence suffered by her ancestors by whites in this country.  Dr. Bernard is a prolif...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Nov. 23, 2019. Nine of us met and all agreed that this was a hard book to digest. Even though we talked for nearly two hours, we didn't have time to comment on all of it. Laura said these "were such horror stories, there's an overall feeling of danger lurking." The eight stories collected in the book are: " The Rockpile " " The Outing " " The Man Child " " Previous Condition " " Sonny's Blues " " This Morning, This Evening, So Soon " " Come Out the Wilderness " " Going to Meet the Man " Most of the stories seem to end with no resolution at all. I think that we're used to stories having some kind of satisfying ending, which Baldwin does not give. The other thing is that when Baldwin used flashbacks, there wasn't really any transitional phrase to cue the reader that what's being describ...

     The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Oct. 5th. Thirteen of us met here at the Wilson Library for a lively discussion of Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves . This collection of essays gathered by Glory Edim features a wide array of writers describing the works that gave them a glimpse of themselves through literature.      Shelara started out by saying that although she didn't see herself in the literature she read at school, her parents made it their purpose to buy books in which she was reflected.       Kay said that when she was growing up she didn't recognize that she wasn't seeing herself in the stories she read, she related, " When I was growing up I think I was colorblind. I was going to the library three or four times a week. I loved the Dick and Jane books and later the white teenage romances. For me it has to be a good story. Of course now, I buy books...

The book scheduled for our August 17 th discussion is Dreamer by Charles Johnson. It takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1966 and Dr. Martin Luther King is staying in a disgusting tenement apartment to underlie the argument for affordable decent housing. Riots are going on all around and Dr. King is questioning as to whether his position of non-violence will work in a northern city. The parts of the book that are in italics are the inner thoughts of Dr. King, the pages in plain type is the story. The narrator is Matthew Bishop, a college dropout who joined the Movement as a record-keeper/note-taker, who says about himself: “I knew I left no lasting impression people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name, I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile…a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself…I was nobody.” Our discussion wasn’t well attended at...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion continued today, Saturday, May 18, 2019 by discussing Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies by Dick Gregory. There were nine of us on Saturday and two of the participants were first-timers. One participant brought her great-grandson who was a first grader and extremely cute. His presence provided us an opportunity to describe the contents of the book without using some of the words or mentioning some of the topics Mr. Gregory presented. Instead of restricting our conversation, this actually enhanced our conversation, forcing us to be creative in our tone and language.   This was Dick Gregory’s last book and in fact he had already passed away when the book came on the market.   We all agreed that this would be a great book for a young person who had no knowledge of African American History. The book details The Middle Passage, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Eli Whitney, The Dred Sco...

On Saturday Jan. 19th the Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series delved into Becoming by Michelle Obama. Eighteen people ended up in attendance, all in various stages of still reading, finished, or still listening to the audio-book. This is our all-time high for attendance!  Almost everyone at the table could relate to the topics Mrs. Obama wrote about such as having grandparents who were part of the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to the North, the abandonment of the inner cities, and of having parents and grandparents who ended up giving up on their dreams due to lack of educational opportunities and being shut out of trade unions.  Mary F. shared how her parents migrated to New Haven from Georgetown SC to look for a better life. They, like Michelle Obama's family witnessed their neighborhood's decline. Mary shared how she went away to college then came back to her old neighborhood to teach, really noticing the deterioration after being away.  ...