When Nat Eastman was a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley, she and her oldest brother would read Harry Potter novels and write letters to each other about the books.
It wasn’t always easy to maintain the connection.
“My oldest brother spent 17 years in California prisons,” says Eastman, the assistant manager and adult book buyer for Chevalier’s Books in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles. “But we had a little two-person book club.”
Since her brother was more than 15 years older, did Eastman think he was reading about the boy wizard to connect with her, the youngest of the family’s seven siblings? “Yeah, he was,” she says. “He would read Harry Potter, and then we would talk about it, but he was also teaching himself Spanish and German and trying to track down classics translated into those languages. So he was definitely watering down his reading to be able to connect with me.”
Eastman, who had two older brothers who spent time in the penal system, said she learned from a young age that books could be a lifeline to a person in prison because it wasn’t always easy to go see her siblings.
“I have such strong memories of visiting my brother. We would drive for hours through the desert … and obviously that’s a specifically California experience, but we would just be in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and then all of a sudden there’d be this massive concrete building, just rising up,” she says, recalling the guard towers and barbed wire. “No grass, nothing green in sight ever.”
Books, she says, were “the only form of escape.”
Inside Chevalier’s Books in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles on November 2, 2024. (Photo by Erik Pedersen/SCNG)
This month, Eastman, working with prison librarians across the country, set up a GoFundMe page through Chevalier’s to raise funds to purchase books for the incarcerated. All proceeds raised go toward the buying and shipping of books.
While organizing Chevalier’s drive, Eastman was also quick to call attention to others doing such work, such as the Los Angeles County Library’s Books for Jails Program; University of California campuses such as UC Irvine’s Books Through Bars and UC San Diego’s program; the Prison Library Project of Claremont’s Book Forum Bookshop, rapper and poet Noname’s Radical Hood Library, Words Uncaged, Freedom Reads and Ahmanise Sanati’s efforts to bring books to L.A. County jails.
For insight into how these programs work, a book coming out on Dec. 1, “This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes From the Appalachian Prison Book Project,” contains a wealth of information about the Applachian project and its effects.
The book includes numerous letters of gratitude: “I’m counting the seconds until I get my second chance,” writes one correspondent. Another, who entered prison as a teen and found salvation in books, describes reading while in solitary confinement: “With every book I have the honor to read, I leave this place, meet new people, learn new things and in some way become a better man.”
“This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep” also touches on the varied requests for reading material the group receives, a small sample of which includes: studies of the Choctaw Nation and Jewish thought; sports and spirituality; dream analysis and homesteading; dictionaries and non-English texts; novels from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Carson McCullers and Thomas Mann. There’s even a request for a book about snake handling.
Or as one request simply states, “Balzac is always good.”
Back to the Chevalier’s drive, Eastman says the response has been positive, and she’s found people typically want to know more. For that reason, the store scheduled a free discussion last night featuring a panel set to include Ra Avis, Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, Luis Garcia, Ahmanise Sanati, and Christopher Soto. (The discussion is going to be recorded and will go up on the website, where you can also find a book list for those interested in learning more.
But for now, Eastman says she’s gathering donations (and suggestions for titles to buy) and preparing for the next stage of the process.
“I’m going to buy tons and tons of books,” she says, laughing as she realized what would come next. “And I’m going to be the one shipping them all.”
These days, her brothers are out of prison and raising families – so does she still talk to her eldest sibling about books?
“My older brother’s son just turned two, and I sent him a bunch of books,” she says. “And, you know, he sent me a picture of him reading to his kid.
“It’s just so incredible that that can happen,” she says. “It just really warms my heart.”
For more on the book drive, check out the GoFundMe page
“Didion & Babitz” by Lili Anolik hits bookstore shelves on Nov. 12. (Courtesy of Scribner)
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