The Maximum Security Book Club

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.