Up Next for Nonfiction Book Club: Common As Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership by Lewis Hyde - Thursday, June 7th @ 6:30pm

Read up and join the PML Nonfiction Book Club at our next discussion of Lewis Hyde's Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, Thursday, June 7th at 6:30pm. As a librarian and writer, I am especially interested in Hyde's work and highly recommend his previous book: The Gift to anyone engaged in creating art in our highly commercial society.

Last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hyde during a speaking engagement and I'm excited for this opportunity to discuss some of the heady arguments in his most recent book. Common As Air investigates the relatively recent idea of creative works as "intellectual property." Especially with an eye toward how this gels with what the founders of our country thought the best usage of the collective store of human invention, intelligence, and art. As opposed to some of the historical adventure stories the nonfiction book club has been reading, this book is essentially a book length essay revealing the thoughts of a wide ranging mind (Hyde's) as they relate to the the idea of a cultural commons and how to best preserve protect and engage with it. So, the long and short of it is you may want to allow yourself some time for your mind to digest Hyde's incisive and wide ranging arguments.

While we do ask you to obtain the book yourself (and there are plenty of copies in the MVLC library system) this book club is free and open to the public. If you have any questions please email me at sthibodeau@mvlc.org. Happy reading!