The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

contributors gone, I wondered whether our discussions could possibly be the same. Funny how in five short months I’d grown attached to these guys. I had no idea then how circumstances would bring us back together.
    The first group of book club members arrived from their cells with sweat beading on their faces and their arms covered in a sheen of perspiration. Now that they had shed their cool-weather long-sleeved waffle-weave shirts in favour of short-sleeved T-shirts, I could see that some arms were alive with tattooed images of coiling snakes, yowling skulls, spiderwebs and Gothic crosses—some faded and some seemingly fresh. A few of the men squeezed into the chaplain’s offices for relief from the heat before the meeting. The offices were air-conditioned, while the cells and other common spaces like the chapel were not.
    When we had all moved to the circle of chairs in the chapel, Carol asked who wanted to start off the meeting with a book recommendation. Ben stepped up first, while some of the others fanned their faces.
    â€œI was reading Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup,” he said. “He’s the author of Slumdog Millionaire , eh? It’s about a murder that takes place and six suspects that they’re trying to investigate and it happens in India. Basically showing that the political system is a bit corrupted from high officials to the slums. It’s hard to get by over there. It’s a really good story.”
    Carol turned to Gaston and asked him whether he had a summer read to recommend.
    Gaston said he’d read Of Mice and Men over the summer because he knew the book club was scheduled to read another Steinbeck novel in the fall, The Grapes of Wrath . I remembered that Lawrence Hill had also recommended Steinbeck to Gaston when he signed his book. “It’s a good short book, easy to read,” he said. “This story is back in Southern times in the 1940s or ’50s. If you’re easily offended by the racism in those times, I wouldn’t recommend reading it, because of the slang they use, but it’s an interesting story.” He had also read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that summer. “It’s the book that Aminata was reading in The Book of Negroes . I just wanted to see what she was reading. It’s almost like a fairy tale with giants and midgets.” I loved how his curiosity guided his book selections. It was how I often chose my own reading material.
    â€œ Gulliver’s Travels is a hard read,” said Carol.
    â€œYeah, I had to stop figuring out the purpose of it,” he admitted. “I was overthinking it.”
    Dread, who was wearing his wool tam over his dreads despite the heat, gave Stieg Larsson’s bestselling mystery novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a rave review. “It’s extremely entertaining,” he said. “The entire story is extremely twisted and well thought out.”
    â€œLisbeth’s a wonderful character,” said Derek, referring to the girl of the book’s title.
    And Winston recommended both of the books he had read: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. “I liked The Cellist ,” he said. “It had four or five perspectives on the war in Sarajevo and the way the author wrote it was a little different from anything I’d ever read before, following different people simultaneously.”The name on Winston’s name tag had changed from the previous month, when he’d used his middle name, Dorian. I was getting used to that in the prison. Some men identified by their last name and prison number, which was standard prison protocol. Others used first names, middle names, aliases, prison nicknames or other monikers. The most accurate identifier was their tattoos.
    Stan said he’d read Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero , and ranked it as “more twisted than the movie.”
    No one had come to