The Prison Book Club Read Online Free

retired English professor with an upper-class English accent. A prison chaplain, Blair, was escorting us because the book group met in the prison chapel. Blair was explaining something about the building. I remember passing the health clinic with its posters about HIV and hepatitis. Then we passed lots of men in white waffle-weave long-sleeve shirts or blue T-shirts and jeans, some pushing carts or carrying mops, and I recall thinking, gosh, they have a lot of staff here.
    The chaplain was saying something about the “telephone pole” design of the prison—a main corridor known as “The Strip” with cell units branching off on both sides. He led us along a sidewalk to a secondary building inside the walls of the prison that looked like a parish hall. And then somehow I was sitting on a wooden chair, waiting for the inmates to arrive, wondering whether to peel off my name tag, which announced to them all that I was ANN.
    The men who walked in the door were dressed in white and blue like the ones I had seen walking freely on The Strip—the guys I had thought were cleaning staff. I was confused. Those were the inmates? Why were they walking around freely like that? Where were the guards and why was the chaplain, the only one wearing a security alarm, leaving the room briefly? And why did Carol look so relaxed? Then one man came toward me with his arm extended and a large smile. “Hello, welcome,” he said. I stood up and grasped his hand and thanked him. Then many of the others followed suit, gracious and non-threatening. For some reason, the black men gravitated toward one side of the circle and the white men sat in chairs closer to me.
    Carol introduced me as the head of the prison book club’s Book Selection Committee, saying that I was an award-winning magazine journalist who had majored in English literature at university. I was just sitting in to get a better sense of which books might appeal to them. After that she led them in a discussion of Dave Eggers’s wonderful non-fiction book Zeitoun , about a Syrian-born landlord and house painter in post-Katrina New Orleans who is swept up by Homeland Security after disobeying orders to evacuate the flooded city. It’s a book I had read and loved, but I have no recollection of what the men said about the protagonist’s good and bad choices or anything else for that matter. Instead I was rehearsing in my mind the self-defence manoeuvres that I had learned in London. I was sure we were about to be taken hostage. It was the first time I had been so close to criminals since the police lineup in London.
    The men seemed equally baffled by my choice to drive such a distance to risk sitting in a room with them, given that I wasn’t proselytizing religion and I wasn’t being paid. After the meeting, a man with dreads and reflector sunglasses, flanked by two other black inmates, approached me and asked, “Miss, why would a nice person like you want to spend time with bad guys like us?”
    That’s a very good question, I thought. But I said, “I’d like to help find you some good books.”
    Another inmate, who I learned later had killed a man and felt profound regret about it, also approached. “I was thinking you look like that movie star,” he said. “What’s her name? I know, Nicole Kidman. You must get that a lot.”
    I felt a chill. “Actually, no one’s ever said that before,” I said, mentioning that she was much taller. Perhaps it was my curly hair that struck him as similar. It was exactly the kind of attention I did not want.
    On my drive back to Toronto I asked myself what I had learned in that meeting that would provide new insight into my book recommendations for the men. Almost nothing, because I was so pathetically scared. I could see that they liked non-fiction, and that Carol challenged them to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and question