The Maximum Security Book Club
Reading Literature in a Men's Prison
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"A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men's prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them--Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran. On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them ten dark, challenging classics--including Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe's story "The Black Cat," and Nabokov's Lolita--books that don't flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict, and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may "only" be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake. Gradually, the inmates open up about their lives and families, their disastrous choices, their guilt and loss. Brottman also discovers that life in prison, while monotonous, is never without incident. The book club members struggle with their assigned reading through solitary confinement; on lockdown; in between factory shifts; in the hospital; and in the middle of the chaos of blasting televisions, incessant chatter, and the constant banging of metal doors. Though The Maximum Security Book Club never loses sight of the moral issues raised in the selected reading, it refuses to back away from the unexpected insights offered by the company of these complex, difficult men. It is a compelling, thoughtful analysis of literature--and prison life--like nothing you've ever read before"--
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Mikita Brottman begins a book club at a maximum security prison. Brottman has experience teaching in college. She begins with the book I hated more than any other school-assigned book I read, Heart of Darkness, and the inmates reaction to the book is similar to mine. She moves next to Bartleby the Scrivener by Moby-Dick author Herman Melville, and the inmates don't connect to it either. But she scores a big hit with the next two of the next three books she tries, Ham on Rye and On the Yard. Macbeth is, somewhat surprisingly, enjoyed as is a Poe short story, but there are mixed feelings about Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde and The Metamorphosis. Two books she expected the inmates to connect with, Junkie and Lolita, had the opposite response from the inmates; the inmates hated both Junkie and Lolita because they saw the characters as repulsive.
One of the parts of the book that most surprised me was a session where the inmates talked about the violence of a father to his child in a book. Brottman felt that was exaggerated, but the inmates shared many similar experiences with Brottman. I was surprised that Brottman didn't realize that home violence is common to prisoners.
Brottman felt like she connected with the inmates during the time she held the club, but she was sad to learn that they seemed to change dramatically when they were released from prison and she did not like who they became.
Awkward. I was hoping for honest reflections on the role reading, engaging with books, can play in incarcerated people's lives, and that was part of the text. The awkward part was the author's realization that literature didn't play as big a role in their lives as in hers, that the book club was an escape that she seemed happy to be part of until confronted with its relative position in others' lives, and ends on a self-pitying note.
There's a real push pull between humanizing the incarcerated, something society needs more of, and focusing on the author's own feelings, experiences. Maybe it's just trying for honest, in which case the unflattering personal portrait is an accomplishment of truth.
I think my personal bias factors in, because formal schooling emphasizing grinding away at a dry, incomprehensible text in faith that there is hidden brilliance is similar to the experiences that sent me into a decade long reading slump, reading behaviour that I now heartily reject. Reading her inflict that on the group intermittently between more savvy book choices is painful.
⚠️animal death, mention of SA
P.S. On the plus side, after some time on Storygraph and Google, I found a memoir for my TBR actually written by an incarcerated person, Sentence: Ten Years and A Thousand Books in Prison. I'm hopeful the shift in POV/ author will make for a more focused read on the subject matter.
