Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  Book discussion of Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday July 23 rd in person at the Wilson Branch Library. Ten of us met and discussed Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. I opened the discussion by asking a question from Readinggroupguides.com: Carney is described as being “only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition” (page 31) --- suggesting a more nuanced understanding of seemingly criminal activity. How does his placement on the crooked spectrum change throughout the course of the novel? How does his crookedness compare to others he does business with? I watched the video of Colson Whitehead being interviewed at the MLK Jr. Library in Washington DC.   In our downtown library we have microfilm readers, people can read old newspapers on these machines.   Colson Whitehead actually said that when he was doing the research for the history, he too, went to old newspap...

    Assata Shakur was accused of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper on May 2, 1973. Assata, herself, was shot in that incident, yet she was handcuffed to her hospital bed and questioned and threatened by local, state and federal police. She was vilified in the press, accused of robbing banks, accused of kidnapping, and all other kinds of crimes. All those trials were either dismissed or she was acquitted. The one conviction, supposedly for the murder of the New Jersey State Trooper occurred in 1977. For four years she had been sent from prison to prison, many times in solitary confinement, once the only female in an all-male prison. In 1979 she escaped from prison and has been living in Cuba.  Assata Shakur tells her story in Assata: An Autobiography . Assata starts her story from the events of May 2, 1973, but then goes back to her childhood, spent between her mother up north and her grandparents down in North Carolina. Assata was restless as a teenager; she even...

 The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday May 14th with a discussion of both Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and   My Monticello (the novella in the collection of the same name) by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson.                          Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993. The main character, teen-aged Lauren Olamina becomes a leader of refugees, walking from Robledo (a fictional town in southern California) to northern California, seeking a safe place to build a community. She's guided by a belief system that she herself penned called Earthseed. She's been prepared collecting food, money, seeds to plant, clothing, and supplies for the day she had to flee. Her neighborhood is burned down by a group of drugged pyromaniacs. Lauren grabs her bag and takes off, attracting fellow travelers along the way.  Jocelyn Nicole Johnson wrote My Monticello is 2021. The ...

   The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met at the Wilson Library on Saturday, Aprl 2nd. We discussed  Ordinary Light  by Tracy K. Smith. This book is actually her memoir, which we chose to read for Poetry Month, rather than a poetry collection. Tracy K. Smith has had four collections of poetry published and one of them, Life on Mars , won the Pulitzer Prize 2011. She was also Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 until 2019. Reading her memoir was like reading poetry, as evidenced by the quoted passages below.  The book,  Ordinary Light , chronicles Tracy K. Smith's young life at home with her middle-class family. Her father is in the military and they mostly live on the military base, surrounded by whites.  She's especially close to her mother, who gets sick and dies while Smith is in college. The book actually opens with her mother's death with a prologue titled "The Miracle." p.5 "Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunn...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion met over Zoom on Saturday June 2, 2022. There were ten of us on the call and we discussed Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math: Notes on an American Family.  The book is a collection of essays about the author’s life in Portland, Oregon, interspersed with “Survivor Files,” which are second person point of view answers to the question, “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”  The book cover features 16 photos of Jackson’s male relatives (photos he took himself with a Polaroid.) There’s no indication which relative’s picture matches which “survivor file,” nor are there any names attached.  One survivor was that close to shooting someone when his sister says, “No don’t! That’s my brother!” Inside, the would-be shooter is so relieved. Later he sees the guy he was going to shoot parked next to him and he has his daughter in the car. He covers his daughter’s body with his; he’s so convinced the guy is going to shoot him. ...

  Ten of us in person plus two more over Zoom met on Saturday Oct. 30 to discuss Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke. Bluebird Bluebird is the initial book in Locke’s Highway 59 Series. The prologue opens with a woman, Geneva Sweet bringing food and music to the graves of her husband and her son. Chapter 1 then begins with the main character Darren Mathews a Black Texas Ranger who is giving testimony on behalf of his friend Rutherford McMillan aka Mack. A white supremacist named Ronnie Salvo constantly harassed and threatened Mack. . One night, when the harassment turned to confrontation on Mack’s property, Mack called Mathews to come out to the property. No violence occurred that night but a few days later, someone found Ronnie Salvo dead and Mathew’s friend Mack is the number one suspect. Mathews’ superiors suspended him for going out to the property outside of authority. While on suspension, he’s given a suspicious assignment to look into two homicides in a town called ...

  Book Discussion of Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump   The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Sept. 18 th at the Wilson Library. Nine of us met in person, while two more people joined in via Zoom. This was one of our most contentious book discussions ever. The people who hated the book were so strong in their assessment that I think that the people who liked it were almost afraid to admit that they liked it. The characters may not be as fleshed out as they could have been and of course the plot is improbable but there were some really funny parts in the book. I understand that the author had studied playwriting, which makes sense because scenes and dialogue are the standout qualities. This book has also been optioned to become a television series.   The protagonist is Claude McKay Love, an average Black young man living on Chicago’s South Side with his grandmother and her friend Paul. Claude’s parents abandoned him when he was...