When I was growing up in Haiti, sometime around eighth grade, before our Parish opened the semi-public library (it was open only to high school students), my friends and I exchanged books through an ingenious system. There were about fourteen of us from two different schools, with respectively maybe three or four books that our parents could afford, but we were always passing those books back and forth between us.
After school, four or five of us would meet somewhere to study and discuss the books that we had read, but we’d only do so if we’d all read a particular book. If, for example, I was the only one who did not read a book, it was my duty to find who was reading it and get in line.
Reading was as important as homework, but it was fun. We looked forward to reading, because then we could have something to share, something that made us feel seen. Before the age of cellphones, it was through reading that we found the elements that strengthened our friendship and helped us grow as future intellectuals. It was our way to build community.
Reading is one activity that, on the surface, seems solitary, but in reality, is very communal. When we sit down to read, there is always a crowd of people. They help us shape and contextualize the subject matter. Our past conversations with them around other books dictate how we understand what we are reading.
I remember, during one of our book discussions in high school, a classmate took it upon himself to make the case for why we were too harsh on Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We had no time for him, but. later, I came to appreciate that classmate’s effort to make us see this character as more than a simple villain, to understand the complexities at play when a human is forbidden to admit his passions. That student was seeing something that at the time we could not.
For those of us who belong to book clubs, we understand the discovery of those sorts of insights well. Such observations from our reading partners allow us to identify our blind spots. In this sense, reading is survival, even more so reading together. Reading keeps us alive, not only through the knowledge, but by allowing us to have a fuller picture of life as a community.
At Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, reading and community have been central to our mission for the past 34 years. This coming season is no different. Each one of this year’s Ten Evenings authors’ books highlights the importance of community for a better society and I’m pleased to announce that you’ll be able to read profiles and interviews with every one of these speakers in the new Pittsburgh Review of Books over the course of our coming season.
From Jill Lepore’s We The People: A History of the U.S Constitution, to Lakshmi Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond, to Beth Macy’s Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, and Angela Flournoy’s novel The Wilderness, we will discover the benefits of coming together to find new ways of understanding community, from how to make our constitution work for everyone to the ways different foodways can make this country more flavorful and more accepting, and to the way enduring friendship can help us sustain the hardships of life.
At a time when everything seems to be bending, if not breaking, it is important to be reminded that alone we can do very little but together we are mighty. This is something that the other authors in our season also explore.
One thing that I love about Paper Girl by Macy, who will join us on December 8, 2025, is the quiet comfort that I get knowing that when my neighbors read the same newspaper, the same book, we share something in common. That our goals might not be too different, and because of that they become easier to reach.
Jess Walter’s So Far Gone is also a lesson in the importance of community, journalism, and the importance of keeping an open mind in a world where everything seems bent on dividing us.
Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth places the fate of the planet in our hands. It is both overwhelming and empowering. We have been exploiting the earth and its inhabitants for the past five hundred years and only we can write another story with a happy ending.
And Merlin Sheldrake’s An Entangled Life shows us an example of what a healthy ecosystem (another type of community) can look like through the strange example of fungi.
This season, through all our lectures, together we will continue to read and discuss ways to find ourselves, to belong, to be seen, and perhaps to help change what we can in the wider world. The lectures, however, are only where this work starts. As novelist R.F. Kuang reminded us last season, “It’s time to think more about what happen next. What would [we] do when [we] turn the last page?”
