Reading Group Roundup

The Standford Hill group tackled Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, an account of his 2,200 mile hike along the US Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. It’s full of bears and bobcats and rattlesnakes and Bryson encounters them all. Think Bear Grylls but funnier.

‘Really enjoying this one and it makes me laugh’. ‘Made me think about my travels when I was younger.’ ‘When I’m released, I’ll be doing a walk somewhere myself.’

At Thameside the group was reading J D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by Trump’s vice-presidential running-mate in the coming November election. Vance grew up in rust-belt Ohio and ‘hillbilly’ Kentucky. It’s the story of a white working class family and culture torn apart by economic collapse, opioids and violence, and how Vance himself escaped.

Most of the group recognised Vance’s experience of the effects of poverty, absent parents and domestic violence, and how they stack the odds against success. education and achievement. But one member had turned it around by studying in prison – first for a degree with the Open University and then a PhD. The response was unanimous –

‘Respect’.

Lots of discussion of Vance’s political rise and his total turnabout from describing Trump as ‘the opioid of the masses’ to becoming his running mate.

One of the Pentonville groups tackled journalist Ben Judah’s This is London, a firsthand account of the city ‘as seen through the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers… in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians’.

The book opens at Victoria Coach station – ‘the entry port’ as one member described it, and everyone agreed on how powerful the scene is: ‘it feels like you’re really there’. There are lots of Londoners in the group and there was recognition and surprise in Judah’s detailed accounts of different parts of the city – from iconic shop fronts to the local mosque and Muslim burial practices.

At Wormwood Scrubs the ambitious group took on Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s monumental 1961 book about war. It’s a furious satire that’s also very funny. The tone made it tricky for some but others loved it- ‘the farce, the satire, the piss-taking’. One member had read it twice ‘Second time round much easier, you can hear him laughing as he’s writing it.’ And reading passages together in the group made it work for everyone. The comparisons with prison didn’t go unnoticed – the bureaucracy, the mad logic of rules and regs, the endless catch-22s of prison regimes.

Not long ago, one of the Bullingdon groups read True Grit, a book made famous by two film adaptions, one with John Wayne in the 1960s and a later version with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.

It’s a Western with a difference. The story is told by 14-year old Mattie Ross, who is on a mission to find the man who killed her father. It was a great hit with the group who found Mattie fascinating – full of fearlessness and skills rarely found in traditional Westerns and least of all in a female character.

‘She weaponises everything – her education, her religion, her accounting skills.’

True grit indeed.

Check out your library to see if your prison has a reading group. If not, encourage your librarian to have a look at PRG’s website www.prisonreadinggroups.org.uk.

PRG is part of Give a Book.