Read With Us: The Good People Wrap Up

It’s been a week since our Zoom discussion of Good People and it’s time to give a little recap.

We had a good group of our regulars plus the addition of a new member. And I couldn’t help but thinking, as I listened to the various comments and insights about the book, how fortunate we are to have smart readers who articular their thoughts and ideas so well. I always come away with new ways of looking at and understanding every book we read.

Our ice breaker question was directly tied to the Read With Us Lounge topic of the week: letting go of the shoulds we impose on ourselves about reading. Kym asked everyone to share one thing you’ve stopped should-ing yourself about. We heard a wide area of true confessions about not reaing things we don’t like, feeling free to write in our books, accepting that just because a book is on a prize list doesn’t mean we will like it, and it’s okay to DNF.

Our discussion was centered around the questions Kym, Bonny, and I asked on our blogs that day. We considered the multiple narrators and whether we thought it was important to keep track of them, whether they were unreliable, and whether we felt it was a positive or negative way of telling the story. The general consensus was that each narrator brought something specific to the story because of their culture and point of view.

We covered what it means to be good people, accepting that good people can still get caught up in gossip and rumors, and that generally the ones we consider to be good people are people who share our personal values. We recognized that we judged the characters, the characters judged each other, and the various cultures added another layer of nuance to each narrator.

Finally, we talked about the fact that our understanding of other people is always incomplete. We need to reconsider the way we judge people and generally agreed that the book says a lot about how we understand others. We ultimately concluded that the book challenges us to see the humanity in other people and stop making snap judgements.

Also of note: Vera was invisible and Pam couldn’t attend but Kym brought her comments to share and they were super insightful and added a lot to the discussion.

Thank you to my fellow Read With Us sponsors, Bonny and Kym, and thanks to all of you who read the book and shared your thoughts about it.