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A review by cashleykate
The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison by Mikita Brottman
1.75
Was this book interesting? Incredibly. But as someone who studied literature and just as a person, the writer seemed INCREDIBLY tone deaf. She ran a book club in a men's prison, part of an academic program, and chose dark books she felt they'd 'relate' to. My first ick was when she decided not to bring up the elements of racism in Heart of Darkness as she felt that wasn't important... girl what?
She continuously tried to have prisoners relate to the more troubled characters, didn't seem to like when they had other takes that misaligned with hers, and didn't seem to consider what THEY might want to read. Charles Dickens has a lot of adventurous novels involving crime if she had to have a criminal, but it all read like some social experiment.
She absolutely lost me at the chapter where she introduces Lolita. "I never saw Lolita as a story about pedophilia, to me it was a love story and a story about language." This woman apparently studied literature and didn't parse that Humbert Humbert is a frankly UNRELIABLE NARRATOR? Was irritated when the prisoners called him as he was, an old perv and pedophile? She created her own view of the men she had in this club and anticipated they would sympathize with Humbert Humbert as an outcast. That is probably the most insulting thing she could have done to those men in my opinion, putting them on the same level as a fictional character that assaults a child. What the actual hell.
I was definitely interested in the experiance, but the author herself was just not someone I could get on the same level with.
She continuously tried to have prisoners relate to the more troubled characters, didn't seem to like when they had other takes that misaligned with hers, and didn't seem to consider what THEY might want to read. Charles Dickens has a lot of adventurous novels involving crime if she had to have a criminal, but it all read like some social experiment.
She absolutely lost me at the chapter where she introduces Lolita. "I never saw Lolita as a story about pedophilia, to me it was a love story and a story about language." This woman apparently studied literature and didn't parse that Humbert Humbert is a frankly UNRELIABLE NARRATOR? Was irritated when the prisoners called him as he was, an old perv and pedophile? She created her own view of the men she had in this club and anticipated they would sympathize with Humbert Humbert as an outcast. That is probably the most insulting thing she could have done to those men in my opinion, putting them on the same level as a fictional character that assaults a child. What the actual hell.
I was definitely interested in the experiance, but the author herself was just not someone I could get on the same level with.