The Prison Book Club (38 page)

Although she has never claimed that the book clubs are designed to rehabilitate inmates, research continues to point to interesting links between reading literary fiction and the growth of empathy. One study by researchers at the New School for Social Research in New York City published in
Science
in 2013 found that study participants who read literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, genre fiction or nothing, performed better on tests that measured empathy and social perception. One hypothesis is that characters in literary fiction are less fully sketched and less stereotypical, requiring the reader to imagine some of their thoughts and thereby empathize.

A report on the U.K. project Prison Reading Groups sets out anecdotal evidence that fiction has played a role in nurturing empathy among their incarcerated readers and found that book discussions contributed to informal learning and pro-social behaviour. So it was surprising to witness new U.K. rules in November 2013 to stop family and friends of inmates sending books to their loved ones in prison. However, those provisions were overturned by a high court justice the following year after a sustained protest by many prominent U.K. authors and free speech campaigners. In Brazil and Italy, meanwhile, some prisons have experimented with reading programs that allow inmates to reduce their prison sentences by reading a prescribed number of approved books.

Since my time visiting the prisons in 2011 and 2012, both Collins Bay Institution and Beaver Creek Institution have changed substantially. Collins Bay, which was a medium-security prison at that time, has now opened a maximum-security unit and absorbed the adjacent minimum-security prison, Frontenac. Similarly, Beaver Creek's minimum-security facility has absorbed its adjacent medium-security prison, the former Fenbrook Institution. Regardless of those changes, the book clubs continue to thrive.

My stack of books from my time in the prison book club occupies a corner of my office reserved just for them. They fill one shelf, two rows deep, and then stack vertically on a lateral filing cabinet in five columns, each more than a foot high. When I look at them, my eye goes to the Dial Press edition of
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
, with its image of a vintage postcard postmarked from Guernsey; my Penguin trade paperback edition of
The Grapes of Wrath
, with the etching of an overloaded truck on the cover; and then of course
Alias Grace
, my old hardcover edition with the bars of a cell superimposed over a Rossetti painting of Elizabeth Siddal. Someday I will separate these books, but not yet. They belong together for now. They mapped my history with the men in 2011 and 2012.

When I began this journey in books with the guys and with Carol, I was encouraged by my father's voice in my head telling me to expect the best of people and they will rise to the occasion. Now all I have to do is look at that stack of books and the men's voices are in my head, offering surprising insights or making me laugh. One look at
The Zookeeper's Wife
, and I remember Peter saying that goodness is more contagious than evil. When I pull
The Grapes of Wrath
off the shelf, I think of Ben's sweet observation about Rose of Sharon as she nurses a starving man after giving birth to a stillborn baby: “She fulfilled her purpose.” With Frank, it was the way that characters stayed with him from book to book and entered his vernacular, like the Beggar-master in
A Fine Balance
, or the father in
Angela's Ashes
, or Shackleton's men from
Endurance
. He made me think about the characters who have stayed with me since the prison book club: scrappy Tom Joad, elusive Grace Marks and bookish Dawsey Adams. And I can't look at the dust jacket of
In the Garden of Beasts
without hearing Graham laughing uproariously and saying “Fritz, count the cutlery,” poking fun at the misguided priorities and parsimoniousness of U.S. ambassador William Dodd and the skulking of his German butler, Fritz.

Whenever I read a work of historical fiction, I'll think of Tom's passionate speech to the Beaver Creek Book Club about the audacity of any author trying to invent what Grace Marks thought. And then I'll picture Byrne telling me about walking the yard at Kingston Penitentiary, looking down at the chicory and buttercups growing between the stones and thinking of his daughter, and remarking on how the opening pages of
Alias Grace
echo that experience.

Someone once asked me what I would do with a spare evening, given the choice between attending a book club meeting with my women friends in Toronto or with the men at Collins Bay or Beaver Creek. I would choose the prison book clubs. I would give up the wine and beer, the hot pear-and-apple crumble and the unusual cheeses to sit without drinking or eating anything in a room with the prison inmates I knew. Why? Because so much more is at stake. Anything could happen there that could change their lives or mine. And I am sure that at least one of their comments would stay with me always.

EPILOGUE

N
OT FAR FROM MY STACK of book club books, in another section of my bookshelf, is an old red cloth-bound volume from my father's books of poetry,
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
that came to me when we emptied my mother's bookshelves in late 2014. One day last spring I opened it for the first time and discovered that it was published in 1950 in London. I'm guessing that my father bought it during his trip to England that year when he went to Little Gidding for the first time. Several pages have the corners turned down and the book first fell open at the poem “Under Ben Bulben,” revealing the lines that my father quoted so often:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Those lines are the epitaph on Yeats's tombstone and they are the lines we said over my father shortly after he died. In my mind I was back where my own journey had started, by my father's grave in the cemetery where the sunken earth was awaiting a marker. I recognized the connections between Eliot's “Little Gidding” and this poem, with their ruminations on death and journeys. Until then, I had always imagined that the horseman was the horseman of death, and that the poet was asking to be spared. But another interpretation came to me that day: the horseman is fear. I had found some of the courage my father wanted me to find. I had created meaning with men who represented the very thing I feared. And, in a strange way, they had guided me back to a better understanding of my father.

READING LIST

A list of books and poems discussed or mentioned in
The Prison Book Club
:

 

Abella, Irving; Troper, Harold.
None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Ackerman, Diane.
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008
.

Adiga, Aravind.
White Tiger: A Novel.
Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2008.

Atwood, Margaret
. Alias Grace.
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2000.

Bar-Levav, Reuven.
Every Family Needs a CEO: What Mothers and Fathers Can Do About Our Deteriorating Families and Values.
New York: Fathering, Inc. Press, 1995.

Barbery, Muriel.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
New York: Europa Editions Incorporated, 2008.

Benioff, David
. City of Thieves.
New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009.

Boyd, William.
An Ice-Cream War.
New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011.

Boyd, William.
Ordinary Thunderstorms.
Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2011.

Boyden, Joseph.
Three Day Road.
Toronto: Penguin Group Canada, 2008.

Brontë, Charlotte.
Jane Eyre.
New York: Dover Publications, Incorporated, 2003.

Brontë, Emily.
Wuthering Heights
. London: Michael O'Mara Books, Limited, 2011.

Brown, Ian.
The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son.
Toronto: Random House Publishing Group, 2010.

Brown, Margaret Wise.
Goodnight Moon.
New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Caron, Roger.
Bingo!: The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot.
Toronto: Methuen, 1985.

Cervantes, Miguel de.
Don Quixote, The ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha.
New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Chapman, Gary D.
The Five Love Languages.
Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009.

Conrad, Joseph.
The Heart of Darkness.
New York: Penguin Books Limited, 2007.

Conrad, Joseph.
The Secret Sharer.
New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 1960.

Crane, Stephen.
The Red Badge of Courage
. New York: Penguin Books, Limited, 2009.

Doctorow, E.L.
Ragtime
. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

Doyle, Roddy.
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
. New York: Random House, 1997.

Eggers, Dave.
Zeitoun.
Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2010.

Eliot, T.S.
Four Quartets
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968.

Eliot, T.S. “Journey of the Magi.”
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Revised
,
Vol. 2.
Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968.

Ellis, Bret Easton.
Less Than Zero
. Toronto: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998.

Fallada, Hans.
Every Man Dies Alone
. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2010.

Farjeon, Eleanor.
The Little Bookroom.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Findley, Timothy.
The Wars.
Toronto: Penguin Group Canada, 2005.

Foucault, Michel.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Toronto: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995.

Fuller, Alexandra.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2003.

Galloway, Steven.
The Cellist of Sarajevo
. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009.

García Márquez, Gabriel.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.

Gladwell, Malcolm.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
. New York: Little Brown & Company, 2007.

Gladwell, Malcolm.
Outliers: The Story of Success
. New York: Little Brown & Company, 2008.

Gladwell, Malcolm.
The Tipping Point
. New York: Little Brown & Company, 2002.

Goddard, Donald.
Best American Crime Reporting 2009.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.

Goddard, Donald.
Joey
. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Golding, William.
Lord of the Flies.
London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 1958.

Gore, Al.
The Assault on Reason.
New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2008.

Greene, Robert.
The 48 Laws of Power
. London: Profile Books, 2002.

Haddon, Mark.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2004.

Hemingway, Ernest.
A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Hemingway, Ernest.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
New York: Scribner, 1995.

Hemingway, Ernest.
The Old Man and the Sea.
New York: Scribner, 1995.

Henry, O. “The Cop and the Anthem.”
The Best Short Stories of O. Henry.
Selected and with an introduction by Bennett A. Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.

Henry, O. “The Gift of the Magi.”
The Best Short Stories of O. Henry.
Selected and with an introduction by Bennett A. Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.

Hill, Lawrence.
Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2001.

Hill, Lawrence.
Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: Anatomy of a Book Burning.
Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013.

Hill, Lawrence.
Some Great Thing.
Toronto, HarperCollins Canada, Limited, 2009.

Hill, Lawrence.
Someone Knows My Name
. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.

Hill, Lawrence.
The Book of Negroes.
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.
Infidel.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.
Nomad.
Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2011.

Homer.
Classics Illustrated No. 77, The Iliad.
Illustration by Alex Anthony Blum. New York: Gilberton Co., 1952.

Homer.
The Iliad.
New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Hosseini, Khaled.
And the Mountains Echoed.
Toronto: Penguin Group Canada, 2013.

Hugo, Victor.
Les Misérables.
New York: Penguin Books Limited, 1982.

Inwood, Brad.
Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Ishiguro, Kazuo.
Never Let Me Go.
Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2010.

Jansson, Tove.
The Summer Book.
Toronto: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1988.

Junger, Sebastian.
War.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2010.

Kershaw, Ian.
The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944–1945.
New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2012.

Kipling, Rudyard. “My Boy Jack.”
100 Poems: Old and New
. Selected and edited by Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Krakauer, Jon.
Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way.
Toronto: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

Lamb, Charles.
Essays of Elia.
London: Hesperus Press, 2009.

Lansing, Alfred.
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Larson, Erik.
Devil in the White City.
Toronto: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.