A valuable book club book

November 10, 2023 3:14 PM

I have been tasked with heading up a book club where I work (an academic library) that will spark discussion around values like care and compassion, and/or integrity and respect. What do you recommend we read?

Of course, I immediately thought of Metafilter to come up with some great ideas, and searched the archives. That search begat finding the recent MetaTalk post by Twicketface that lead to Jason Pargin's essay on the Monkeyshere (helpfully linked by Snerd).

Obviously, this particular essay would not be appropriate for a work-based book club, but what I did like about it is that it was provocative and used analogy to guide the reader through the topic. I'm hoping to choose a non-fiction book, perhaps with essays?, that isn't preachy or treacly, but also isn't too heavy and um, academic. Yes, we work in an academic library, but we want this to be something that a variety of folks will be interested in reading and spark some interesting discussion. Any ideas, MeFites??

posted by BeBoth to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

Best answer: D'Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism? Kinda academicky, but they do have a sense of (sometimes gallows) humor.
posted by humbug at 3:30 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Seventy Times Seven is about a terrible murder of a lovely elderly woman, which was perpetrated by a small group of young girls, young teenagers, of whom one was sentenced to death.

One of the family members believed that his grandmother would not have wanted the girl to be executed and he became rather vocal about this, which enraged the community and many members of his family. In the midst of this, the legality of the death penalty for minors (minors at the time of the crime) was challenged, and ultimately the question of life sentences without parole for minors also was determined.

Not only is this an interesting and careful look at the full circumstances of the girl, her family and early life, and the elderly woman and the care that she had shown to all of the people in her community, but it also is brave enough to look at the grandson's unconscious intentions when he decided to forgive the girl, and to make contact with her, in addition to doing work to challenge the death penalty. (Some of that reckoning comes late enough in the book that I was getting mad at him and yelling at the book "what do you want from her?" before his unconscious motives were dug into).

Care, compassion, integrity and respect permeate this book both in good and in bad examples.

I am a long time hospice volunteer and have long wished that I could get my book club to really look deeply into death and dying, because that's a little bit of everything all wrapped up in something no one (other than me) wants to talk or think about, but Seventy Times Seven is a good one for hard questions that are looked at from a large number of perspectives.
posted by janey47 at 3:39 PM on November 10, 2023

Best answer: Ed Yong's An Immense World!
posted by minsies at 3:43 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Under care and compassion, I would read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and then the very next month I would read Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards. The books are both quite bleak in their themes, but I opposite ways, so I consider one to be the antidote to the other (but do read them in the order I said...In the order I gave they combine to a conclusion along the lines of "the best of all possible worlds". In the other order you would combine to the conclusion "everything sucks and there's no point to anything."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:53 PM on November 10, 2023

Best answer: Oh, and after you finish your discussion of Mercy Among the Children, get drunk together and watch the Good Place episode about Doug Forcett, just to drive home that antidote a little bit.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:55 PM on November 10, 2023

Best answer: Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:17 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Molly McCully Brown's book of essays, Places I've Taken My Body, is excellent. Brown lives with cerebral policy, and I think her essays could lead to discussion of what it means to have both compassion and respect for someone living with disability. Her writing is also gorgeous. From a review by Jamie Quatro: From the locus of her own constantly changing, often intractable body, Molly McCully Brown captures the fullness of the human experience ― desire, loss, flesh, faith, poetry, place, memory ― with lyric compression and expansive grace. Reading these exquisite essays made me want to get out and do something with my own body ― kneel at an altar and recite the Hail Mary, stub out a cigarette in Bologna, stand on a hilltop and shout expletives at the Trump administration. Which is to say, these are urgent, compelling essays that remind us how to be fully alive inside our own bodies, wherever we take them.

I'd also suggest The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. The book is more sympathetic to the Hmong parents, but it's a situation where everyone is trying to do the right thing with sometimes disastrous results. I think it could spark some interesting discussion of what compassion means when the cultural differences are so great (you did say provocative). It's written for a general audience, not academics, though I do know someone who was required to read it in med school.
posted by FencingGal at 4:29 PM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I still think Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things is very wise about the more vulnerable, fallible aspects of human morality.

It's also an enthralling read.
posted by yellowcandy at 5:07 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Fencing Gal's recommendation is a great one, especially if you know that the Central Valley hospital system instituted a program directed at the Hmong community that incorporates Hmong healers into the western treatment protocols.
posted by janey47 at 5:51 PM on November 10, 2023

Best answer: I thought of the Fadiman book (“Spirit Catches You…”) too, but was trying to remember the title. I’m so glad it was mentioned by FencingGal.

The essayist Leslie Jamison might also fit the bill, specifically The Empathy Exams.
posted by SomethinsWrong at 7:46 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande.
posted by lulu68 at 8:45 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The Harold Fry trilogy by Rachel Joyce is very grounded in the values you mention, as well as being genuinely hilarious and incredibly moving. The first two books are concurrent, from different viewpoints, while the third takes place 10 years later. They're all quite short books.
posted by goo at 1:15 AM on November 11, 2023

Best answer: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a book of essays by the author that "explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all." It is thought-provoking about how people and communities do and should care for each other and the personal stories and narratives are an illustration of resilience, imagining justice, and collective care.
posted by lizard music at 10:57 AM on November 11, 2023