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Reclaiming Our Brains without Losing Our Minds relates the story of a group of women in Yakima, Washington, who form a reading discussion group. Over the course of twenty-nine years, the women hone their minds, exchange ideas, and discover a sense of community that extends beyond the page.
List of contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Part I: Reclaiming Our Brains
1 We Become a Reading Group: How and Why
2 The Kind of Books We Read and the Way We Choose
Them
3 From Lunch to Lecture: Why Do We Keep Coming
Back?
Part II: Responses to Books We Have Read
4 Mutations of the Novel Over Time: From Boccaccio's
Decameron to Lessing's The Golden Notebook
5 From Poem to Novel: Dante Then and Now-The
Inferno and The Dante Conspiracy
6 Verisimilitude in the Historical Novel: Alessandro
Manzoni's The Betrothed
7 Every Novel Has a Clock: Reeds in the Wind, The House
by the Medlar Tree, and The Leopard
8 Looking at the Invisible with Italo Calvino
9 Life is Short but Long on Zest in Stendhal's
Charterhouse of Parma
10 Buddenbrooks: The Ordinary Novel
11 No Rest Cure for Readers on the Magic Mountain
12 On Holiday with Felix Krull
vi Reclaiming Our Brains Without Losing Our Minds
13 Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the Horsemen of the
Apocalypse
14 Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don: A Novel of War and
Peace
15 Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:
Learning to Want the Inexhaustible
16 A Doris Lessing Debut: The Grass Is Singing, and We
Sing With It
17 Getting What We Want or Wanting What We Get: Does
J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Have a Happy Ending?
18 Unlived Lives and Our Roles in Perpetrating Them
19 "I can't see where I am going. My life finished. It spoil.
It spoil": V. S. Naipaul's Vision of survivors in Post-
Colonial Worlds
20 Well Lived Lives and the Costs They Exact: Guy De
Maupassant and Isak Dinesen
21 Emigrants in "The Golden Land"
22 Emigrant or Immigrant: A Challenge for Giants
23 The Costs of Building the Soria Moria Castle
24 The [Tainted] Vision of Emma Blau
25 From Jyoti to Jasmine, Jase, Jane, and Jase Again: A Journey of Transformations
26 Self-Help and Other-Help: A Means to an End
27 More Responses to Our Study of Immigrant Novels
28 Migrants in Search of Kinder Suns
29 Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Novel of Homecoming
Appendix 1: Thursday Readers by Correspondence
Appendix 2: The Books We Have Read
Bibliography
About the author
By Inga Wiehl
Summary
Reclaiming Our Brains without Losing Our Minds relates the story of a group of women in Yakima, Washington, who form a reading discussion group. Over the course of twenty-nine years, the women hone their minds, exchange ideas, and discover a sense of community that extends beyond the page.
