Nick

For one thing, nonfiction brings out a variety of readers. You don’t have to “belong” to our nonfiction book discussion group – if you see we’re discussing a title that interests you, you are welcome to come. We have had much success in our goal to attract male participants, and while we have a core group of regulars (female and male), there are almost always new faces each month because of the variety of material available for the program. We’ve had World War II submariners (for Terrible Hours)to employees of GE (for Jack: Straight from the Gut) to scuba divers (for Shadow Divers) to people with family histories dovetailing our books at discussions. Their experiences always lend insight into a title. The fun thing, as with fiction, is that readers bring their own individual experiences to the book, and that always makes for interesting discussion.

Our readers are often very animated about their feelings about the author, the author’s angle on an issue presented, the readability and language of a work, and the broader truths a book may point toward. Sure, there’s always discussion about interesting “data contained in the book,” the author’s version of facts, which I rarely consider irrefutable or non-discussible, and there are (hopefully) always some “I’ didn’t know thats” about a book. Our job as facilitors is to go beyond those to open up the controversies, the dicotomies, the thoughts that were either only hinted at or those left unsaid. Good nonfiction is ripe with material to chew on, pull apart, and discuss.

In fact, we do quite a bit of “questioning the narrator’s reliability, building opposing arguments, coming to new conclusions, debating characters and interpreting events” in the nonfiction we discuss as a group.

While nonfiction may present a certain truth as a given, that is all the more reason to discuss it – how better than among other interested folk to tease out the truths that may lay outside the bounds of an author’s view or motivation?

I agree with Holley that books, both fiction and nonfiction, should take us beyond the book covers, whether that is dissecting a character’s motives, the causes of a war, ways to sustain human life on earth, whatever. Nonfiction is a legitimate and popular venue for reading, and it should be for discussion as well, from literary elements to real life truths.

Gloria, Downers Grove