The 2016 US presidential election pushed Jackie Snow to action: She decided to volunteer for DC Books to Prisons, a nonprofit that sends free books to incarcerated people across the country. For The Los Angeles Review of Books, Snow describes her own literary journey doing this work, and how inmates’ letters opened her up to genres, like romance, that she had previously dismissed. Their correspondence also helped her see that for many people, reading is simply about pleasure and entertainment.
What our incarcerated readers demonstrate is that true literary autonomy isn’t about reading “better” books—it’s about the fundamental right to read freely to pursue pleasure rather than prestige, to seek what speaks to our individual humanity rather than what serves institutional expectations.
Between those expected messages, letters could be anything, turning me into a research librarian. Klingon dictionary requests showed up a few times a year (sometimes rejected because prison officials didn’t want incarcerated Star Trek fans to be able to communicate secretly). Transgender women wrote in a couple of times looking for books on vocal feminization. I had a mom in Kansas send us stamps and a brief letter asking for a book on helping children with ADHD. Requests for what I called the white-power trilogy showed up every so often—books on Norse, Celtic, and Viking history. I tried to give those requests the benefit of the doubt, seeing lots of letters from people trying to connect to their roots in prison, and sent along factual (but often dry) histories.
More picks about reading
The Missing Pages
“Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained her through the tumult.”
The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)
“Clarke Seicher is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation.”
Politics After Literacy
“Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.”
Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?
“A critic considers the strange moral pressure we feel to read to the very last page.”
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
“Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.”
