Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
An important reason for reading is to find inspiration in stories and in lives of real people. Beautiful writing lures us in and the characters and plot keep us reading, but it is that precious realization of the worth of what we learned that leads us into finding the next inspiring book.
It helps to heal our own heart when others have the same problems and we learn that we are not alone or completely different from others. A good book gives us courage to go on and to do the best we can. Life hands us troubles and books show us characters that have experienced the same kinds of things and have triumphed. If they have not triumphed then they at least still kept on trucking.
I finished the book Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, a memoir by Laura Bates and it spoke poignantly about the ability of Shakespeare to reach prisoners and heal their hearts. It is an amazing story. Those of us who love the plays will not be surprised because they have spoken to us, too. Shakespeare understood what a prison was and that not all prisons are made of walls inside barbed wire.
I learned about Shakespeare when I was ten or eleven by reading Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. It can be read here:
http://www.eldritchpress.org/...
Many of my readers love Shakespeare and if they could only take one book to a desert island it would be his complete plays and poems. Imagine a solitary jail cell as a desert island and one young man who uses all the money he has to buy the 2000 page works and then knows it so well that he can turn to the quote he wants as he visits briefly with someone about the works.
To imagine this, you need to read Dr. Bate’s touching and heart-breaking as well as inspirational memoir.
The story is inspirational because Larry, the main prisoner who shines in the story, helps create workbooks to be used by other prisoners and together they create one for at-risk-teens hoping to prevent them from making the mistakes the other prisoners and Larry made.
Here is an interview that explains how Dr. Bates got involved with the prisoners.
Shakespeare: working magic in solitary confinement
Can Shakespeare really touch the hearts of America's most hardened criminals? Professor Laura Bates says the answer is yes.
By Marjorie Kehe, Books editor May 15, 2013
http://www.csmonitor.com/...
Q: What gave you the idea of teaching Shakespeare to prisoners in solitary confinement?
Initially I got the idea to do volunteer work in prison because a friend of my husband’s was working in a maximum security prison. I sort of challenged the whole idea. I thought these maximum security prisoners were beyond rehabilitation. And so I started my own program [teaching college classes] at the local Chicago Cook County Jail with first-time offenders. I didn’t know what “supermax” was until one of my students was sent there. Flash-forward 25 years: Here I am teaching in supermax.
In another interview, Dr. Bates talks about Larry:
Teaching Shakespeare In A Maximum Security Prison
April 22, 201312:00 PM ET
http://www.npr.org/...
MARTIN: If you just joining us, I'm speaking with English professor Laura Bates. We're talking about her new book "Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard."
You focus a lot of the book on - and I think the title comes from here too - is your friendship with one of the prison's, you know, again, we're using this kind of loaded language, but notorious prisoner, somebody named Larry Newton. And you weren't sure that even you could reach him when you first met. But he turned out to be a remarkable student. He impressed you as soon as you started talking to him about Richard II. And he eventually wrote a number of workbooks…
BATES: Yes.
MARTIN: ...that you then used in the program and that other people can use in other programs too. Could you talk a little bit about him?
BATES: Absolutely. In fact, one of the results of publishing this book I hope will be that we get some of these other materials - these workbooks that Larry and I created together. I hope we get those out into a wider audience because I am using them, not only in the other prisons that I'm working with now throughout the state of Indiana, and I'm even working now in the Federal Bureau Of Prisons, I'm using his workbooks even with college students on campus and with area high school students.
So it has a wide, wide range of appeal. What Larry's basic approach was exactly that idea, that getting insight into Shakespeare's characters, providing insight into your own characters. So he and I together created full length workbooks to 13 of Shakespeare's plays. And in each of those workbooks there is a day by day what he calls considerations, a point to consider in the play that involves examining the motives of the character and always bringing it right back to your own motives and your own choices.
From Shakespeare Saved My Life
In the introduction to the teen’s workbook Larry says:
Pg. 189
…What matters is your own psychological prison-and you can break those chains. What have you got to lose? What else do you have to do? The worst that can happen is that you miss one television show. The best that can happen is that you find true freedom.
Pg. 278
In the introduction to Larry’s work, (The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Work of Shakespeare), Larry says:
…Shakespeare is simply an environment that allows us to evolve without the influence of everyone else telling us what we should evolve into. Shakespeare offers a freedom from those prisons! Your mind will begin shaking the residue of other people’s ideas and begin developing understandings that are genuinely yours! That is the goal of these Shakespearean efforts. You have nothing to lose but the parts of you that do not belong anyhow.
Here is a 15 minute video of Dr. Bates explaining her program with a tape of Larry Newton newly returned to the regular prisoner’s side from solitary telling an audience that included his mother what he felt about Shakespeare. Reading the book introduced me to Larry and I read his speech there, but watching him give it was just wonderful.
Shakespeare in Shackles: The Transformative Power of Literature: Laura Bates at TEDxUCLA
https://www.youtube.com/...
I fully recommend reading this book. Yes, it is heartbreaking, but it is also heart-warming and teaches us once again the power of words to transform lives. I am sure that reading the Lamb's tales and later reading the plays for myself changed my life in ways I will maybe never understand. They certainly appealed to my imagination and helped me fall in love with the world of books.
I am grateful for that.
What books have healed or inspired you? I think Mrs. Mike by the Freedmans is the one that has done the most for me since I first read it at a young age. Seeing our life as a weaving…seeing that the people we love are woven into the story of us…has helped me cope all these years.
My H authors: ( I cannot list all the H authors or all the books for each author so feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.)
NON-FICTION
Haffner, Sebastian
Defying Hitler, a memoir, Germany 1914-1934 (39)
Havel, Václav
To the Castle and Back
Letters to Olga
Herriot, James (semi-autobiographical, based on true stories)
All Creatures Great and Small
All Things Bright and Beautiful
All Things Wise and Wonderful
The Lord God Made Them All
Hickam, Homer
Torpedo Junction
Rocket Boys
The Coalwood Way
Sky of Stone
Hightower, Jim
Thieves in High Places : They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back
Huntley, Paula
Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo
FICTION
Hardy, Thomas
Return of the Native
Far from the Madding Crowd
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Under the Greenwood Tree
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia (Historical Fiction)
The Cause
The Homecoming
The Question
The Dream Kingdom
The Restless Sea
The White Road
The Burning Roses
The Measure of Days
The Foreign Field
The Fallen Kings
The Dancing Years
The Winding Road
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The House of Seven Gables
The Marble Faun
Hašek, Jaroslav
The Good Soldier Svejk
Hazzard, Shirley
Transit of Venus
The Great Fire
Heller, Joseph
Catch 22
Helman, Lillian
Plays
Helprin, Mark
Winter’s Tale (fantasy)
A Soldier of the Great War
Hemingway, Ernest
By-Line Ernest Hemingway (non-fiction)
The Old Man and the Sea
Islands in the Stream
The Sun Also Rises
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Farewell to Arms
Short Stories
Henry, O.
The Ransom of Red Chief
http://classiclit.about.com/...
The Gift of the Magi
Hersey, John
Hiroshima (non-fiction)
The Call
The Wall
Heyer, Georgette
The Masqueraders
The Grand Sophy
Beauvallet
Venetia
The Black Moth
The Talisman Ring
The Corinthian
Friday’s Child
The Reluctant Widow
The Quiet Gentleman
Hoffman, Alice
Blue Diary
Here on Earth
Practical Magic
Blackbird House
Foretelling, The
Skylight Confessions
The Red Garden
Homer
The Iliad
Richmond Lattimore
The Odyssey
Fitzgerald
Fagles
Hugo, Victor
(I have only listened to the musical versions of the two stories)
Les Misérables
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
CHILDREN’S/YA
Hentoff, Nat
Jazz Country
Hinton, S. E.
The Outsiders
MYSTERY
Hambly, Barbara (she also writes fantasy)
Benjamin January series, set in New Orleans during the 1830’s
A Free Man of Color
Fever Season
Graveyard Dust
Sold Down the River
Die Upon a Kiss
Wet Grave
Days of the Dead
Dead Water
Dead and Buried
Hamilton, Lyn
Maltese Goddess
Thai Amulet
Magyar Venus
Etruscan Chimera
Xibalba Murders
Celtic Riddle
Mocha Warrior
African Quest
Orkney Scroll
Hamilton, Steve
A Cold Day in Paradise
Winter of the Wolf Moon
The Hunting Wind
North of Nowhere
Blood Is the Sky
Ice Run
A Stolen Season
Misery Bay
Die a Stranger
Let It Burn
Hammett, Dashiell
The Maltese Falcon
The Thin Man
Hendricks, Gay and Tinker Lindsay
First Rule of Ten
Second Rule of Ten
Third Rule of Ten
Higashino, Keigo
The Devotion of Suspect X
Hill, Susan (Simon Serrailler)
The Various Haunts of Men
The Pure in Heart
The Risk of Darkness
The Vows of Silence
The Shadows in the Street
The Betrayal of Trust
A Question of Identity
SCIENCE-FICTION/FANTASY
Hamilton, Peter F.
Great North Road (also a mystery as well as a fantasy)
Mindstar Rising
A Quantum Murder
The Nano Flower
Pandora’s Star
Judas Unchained
Hearn, Lian
Heaven’s Net Is Wide
Across the Nightingale Floor
Grass for His Pillow
Brilliance of the Moon
Heinlein, Robert A.
Door into Summer
Stranger in a Strange Land
Herbert, Frank
Dune
Children of Dune
Dune Messiah
Hobb, Robin
Farseer Trilogy
Royal Assassin
Assassin's Apprentice
Assassin's Quest
Liveship Traders series
Ship of Magic
Madship
Ship of Destiny
Tawny Man
Fool’s Errand
Golden Fool
Fool’s Fate
The Rain Wilds Chronicles
Dragon Keeper
Dragon Haven
City of Dragons
Blood of Dragons
Fool’s Assassin
Howey, Hugh
Wool
The H list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
My I books (all together)
Ionesco, Eugène
The Rhinoceros
Irving, John
A Prayer for Owen Meaning
The World According to Garp
Irving, Washington
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Ishiguro, Kazuo
The Remains of the Day
Ivins, Molly
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
Bushwhacked
Bill of Wrongs with Lou Dubose
The list for I :
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! How to have ideas.
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
This diary really hit me since I have just read Shakespeare Saved My Life.
Thinking Outside the Cell: Concrete Suggestions for Positive Change
by Susan Sered
http://www.dailykos.com/...
LGBT Literature: Russia Before the Revolution
by pico
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Contemporary Fiction Views: Back Where They Started
by bookgirl
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Poll (You don't have to like all of the choices in the same line to vote for your favorite, honest)