Welcome back! Thanks for joining us for our podcast book group: Reading with Libraries!

In our book group we have fun talking about books, and provide useful information for library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many books out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together.

Who is joining us this week? We are very pleased to welcome Guest Host Kitt Godfrey.

Beverages:

Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages, and we each came prepared with our own drink to enjoy while we talk about our books. You are an important part of this book group, so if you don’t have a beverage go ahead and get one now. Each of our beverages will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!

From the Social Issues Research Center journal: “the primary function of drinking-places, in almost all cultures, appears to be the facilitation of social interaction and social bonding.” And that indeed is our plan with today’s edition of our book group, as we admire interactions of all kinds of different social groups – including dedicated readers everywhere.

To celebrate, we are drinking a selection of the most popular beverages in the world today! (For the full list you can check out the article on our website)

Coca-Cola, United States

“Invented by a pharmacist as a remedy to headaches in 1886, the world’s most popular carbonated soft drink is like the American dream in a can — from nothing, 85 eight-ounce cans of Coke were consumed globally per capita in 2008 — more than any other soda. The drink has gone through various manifestations, including Diet, Cherry, Lemon and Zero, but it’s the original, with a brain-freezing, nasal-passage-penetrating kick that keeps ’em coming back for more.”

Coffee, Ethiopia

“There’s a reason coffee, said to have been discovered in Ethiopia, is one of the world’s most traded commodities — Monday mornings happen to all of us. This little green bean arguably deserves more than one entry in this list, but for all the various modes of ingestion — latte, cappuccino, mocha, American — you only need to know one thing to start your day off well — there’s more where it came from.”

Tea, Global

“In Tibet the butter version keeps cold bodies warm and lips chap-free. In India it provides a sugary boost and a break from street chaos. In Japan it’s consumed in an elaborate ritual. In the UK it’s accorded magic potion status. Nothing seems quite so bad when you hear the words, “What you need is a nice cup of tea.” “

Gin And Tonic, England

“Trust the Brits to make a medicine (the quinine in tonic water was used by the British East India Company to prevent malaria) more palatable by throwing in some booze. Still, we’re glad they did, as the clink-clink, glug-glug, fizzzz of a gin and tonic being poured is about as perfect an introduction to a balmy evening as it’s possible to find.”

Baileys Original Irish Cream, Ireland

The benevolent wizards who make Baileys credit “38,000 of the top-bred Irish dairy cows grazing on approximately 1,500 selected Irish farms mainly on the east coast of Ireland” for producing the rich cream that makes their god-like elixir the top-selling Duty Free liqueur brand in the world. Complements everything from coffee to Cointreau.

Sake, Japan

Served chilled, hot or room temperature, depending on your mood or meal, sake is stronger than wine and weaker than vodka. No matter the temperature though, sake has a cool dry flavor, and like wine, flavor accents vary with quality and type.

Mojito, Cuba

It’s named after a Cuban seasoning, or an African amulet; it was invented by the Cubans, or in honor of Sir Francis Drake; it should be made fresh and simple, or you can change it up whatever your whim. All depending on who you ask. Everyone has their own take on the mojito, reportedly Ernest Hemingway’s favorite drink, so that the mix of white rum, lime, sugar, mint and soda water, can turn you into the life of the conversation, or a flailing, wailing drunk.

Genre Discussion:

Today we are talking about books that look at different groups of people, and books that will help us to learn about the ways people live. It’s going to be all over the place, but all the books have one thing in common: people are endlessly fascinating, and you can never know enough about all the different ways people are. We are calling this sociology, and what is sociology? From the University of North Carolina: “Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions. Sociology’s subject matter is diverse, ranging from crime to religion, from the family to the state, from the divisions of race and social class to the shared beliefs of a common culture, and from social stability to radical change in whole societies. Unifying the study of these diverse subjects of study is sociology’s purpose of understanding how human action and consciousness both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures.”

“Sociology offers a distinctive and enlightening way of seeing and understanding the social world in which we live and which shapes our lives. Sociology looks beyond normal, taken-for-granted views of reality, to provide deeper, more illuminating and challenging understandings of social life. Through its particular analytical perspective, social theories, and research methods, sociology is a discipline that expands our awareness and analysis of the human social relationships, cultures, and institutions that profoundly shape both our lives and human history.”

Suggested Reading Resources:  

Here are some lists of suggestions from our friends at Goodreads:

• Immigrant Experience Literature
• Best Books To Frame Thinking
• Books White People Need To Read
• Sociology Books
• Behaviour change and social psychology: how people make decisions
• Breaking the Silence: Talking About Violence Against Women
• Nonfiction With a Side of Self-Help
• The Best Social Studies Library List
• Radical Thoughts for the 21st Century
• Best Novels on Racism and Discrimination

From Book Scrolling: A Ranking Of The Best Sociology Books

Top 10 Must-Read Books for Sociology Students Social Science Careers

 30 Great Books About Sociology and Social Sciences

 Five Must-Read Sociology Books | Owlcation

From Thompson River University: Books to Get You Started – Sociology

Our Book Discussion

Now we are a little more familiar with this week’s genre, and we have enjoyed some of our special beverages, let’s get to the book discussion!

As always, the images and links below are from Amazon.com. If you click on any, and happen to buy a lovely book (or anything else!), Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits. Yay!! Thanks in advance for doing this!!

“They want riders–young riders– good riders!”. The news spread quickly from ranch to ranch. Cowboys, stagecoach drivers, trappers, and prospectors rushed to join the newly formed Pony Express. This business of carrying the mails across country sounded mighty exciting!

It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.

As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.

An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.

Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work—but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.”

Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.

Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam’s Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.

For over 40 years, high school students in Foxfire programs have helped to gather and publish information about their Southern Appalachian heritage. Best known for the best-selling Foxfire Book series, the series and the other topical titles were all grown from interviews gathered for The Foxfire Magazine. The success of the student-driven program led to professional research that generated the Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning and its support materials for use by other educators hoping to achieve similar levels of student involvement and create life-long learners.

Now a New York Times bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world’s most underappreciated forces: shame.

‘It’s about the terror, isn’t it?’
 
‘The terror of what?’ I said.
 
‘The terror of being found out.’

For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us – people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they’re being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.

A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people’s faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control.

Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws – and the very scary part we all play in it.

Born on a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in the travelling community’s long history. As a child, Maggie rode and slept in a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father’s campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional ways disappeared. Eventually Maggie married a house-dweller and tried to settle for bricks and mortar, but she never lost the restless spirit, the deep love of the land and the gift for storytelling that were her Romani inheritance.

Maggie’s story is one of hardship and prejudice, but also, unforgettably, it recalls the glories of the travelling life, in the absolute safety of a loyal and loving family.

After her years in domestic service, Winifred Foley married and started a family. But while scraping a living as a charwoman in a rundown north London tenement, she continued to long for her home in the Forest of Dean and the cherished relatives she had left behind. 

Determined to give their children the rural upbringing she had enjoyed, the young couple moved to an isolated, crumbling cottage not far from the forest. But even in the 1950s, they lacked heating or running water, and money was tight. Food was begged, borrowed or homegrown, and their clothes were hand-me-downs. It was a primitive life of hard work on the land, struggling to make ends meet and finding strength in the embrace of a loving family.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion with our Reading with Libraries podcast book group! A special thank you to our Guest Host Kitt!

Join us next Thursday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is always interesting! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!