March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

January 4, 2007
San Francisco, CA

Happy New Year from the California desk of the Big Read! I’m newly ensconced here for a few days, drumming up Big Read applications in a few hard-to-reach corners of the country, looking in on the pilot program for The Big Read in Corrections, and hosing down the occasional office brushfire with a 3,000-foot hose — spraying what I hope is water, not kerosene. Leave that for Montag in Fahrenheit 451.

Next week I fly and drive to Marfa, Texas, which to hear Big Read organizer Alice Jennings tell it is even, shall we say, cozier, than anticipated. Notwithstanding its reputation as an arts mecca whose Lannan Foundation writers-in-residence cabins have hosted the likes of Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace, it’s still a tiny town where driving to the airport at 5 in the morning will apparently put me at risk of caroming off quadrupeds I’ve never even heard of. Marfa is apparently taking to Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima like a Californian to somebody else’s water, so this trip shapes up as another real treat, of which you can expect to hear more soon.

After Marfa I head to the Bay Area for, among other things, a mite more Big Read outreach. Outreach, for those as unfamiliar with this term of art as I was two years ago, is the delicate practice of encouraging cities and towns still unenlightened about the Big Read to jump in the pool, especially with our February 12 application drawing ever nigh. (As Jacques-Yves Cousteau used to say, see bottom.)

Also in San Francisco, my old colleagues at the National Book Critics Circle are hosting their annual award nominations announcement West of the Hudson River for the first time at 6 pm on Saturday, January 12, inside storied City Lights Bookstore at Columbus Avenue and Broadway. Joining me will be Big Read author Amy Tan, poet, painter, City Lights proprietor and all-around living landmark Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his fellow writer-publisher-activist Dave Eggers, and more West Coast writers than New York can shake a dismissive finger at.

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

In between catching up with old friends, I’m newly tasked to begin some fruitful conversations about how the NEA can help restore book reviewing to its rightful place at the heart of American thought. With that in mind, I’d like to inaugurate a regular feature of the Big Read Blog, namely to spotlight the one old book review that arguably put each Big Read author or book on the literary map to stay. Contrary to partisans on either side of the old argument, the writers we love are both born and made, and the ones who make them have almost always been book reviewers.

Since I’m still sawing away at my Twain reader’s guide, the first review I’ll feature is novelist William Dean Howells’ reputation-making unsigned notice in the December 1869 number of the Atlantic Monthly for Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, savorable online thanks to the University of Virginia Library. Howells wrote, “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature…we think [Twain] is…quite worthy of the company of the best.” (A tip of the Big Read Blog chapeau to Ron Powers’ exemplary life of Twain for the referral.)

So screamed Mark Twain’s comet across the sky, with a national reach it never had before, never to dim again. I hope you enjoy this all-important footnote to Twain’s rise because, coming to this space, there’ll be discussions of a watershed review or two for all 21 Big Read books in the new year. That, along with much else and more of it, as the Big Read phenomenon gets called up from its record-smashing Triple-A season last year and reaches the bigs in 2008. See you here again in a couple of days, drop me a line at bigreadblog@arts.gov, and please apply for a 2008-9 Big Read at www.neabigread.org/application_process.php…

December 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Sometimes, even if the picture won’t win any prizes, the subjects are the story. Snapped here are Big Read partners Jane Wood and Henry Fortunato, flanking a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jane presumably brings the same dynamism to chairing the English department at Park University that she’s brought to co-organizing a Big Read, while bemused, voluble Henry directs public affairs at the nearby Kansas City Public Library. Darwin, meanwhile, helped start World War I, if you believe a text panel accompanying this display inside Kansas City’s new National World War I Museum (one of Jane and Henry’s Big Read partners). But more about that later.

It was my privilege to fly into Kansas City two weekends ago for the finale of their salute to A Farewell to Arms. What I saw there capped a series of fine recent Reads, each superlative in its own way. Attleboro, Mass., whose Fahrenheit 451 Read I posted about not long ago, drummed up some of the strongest school participation I’ve seen yet. Rochester, N.Y. — not surprisingly, in light of its Kodak history and consequent movie madness — programmed an ambitious film series around The Maltese Falcon, and created a readable, handy, stylish Big Read calendar that could serve as a model for Big Read cities everywhere. And in White Plains, a SUNY Purchase English professor hosted an absolutely exemplary book discussion, putting aside academic jargon to engage a score of townspeople whose demographics rivaled Pauline Kael’s proverbial World War II movie bomber crew for diversity.

Back in Missouri, the celebration of A Farewell to Arms combined sturdy versions of these three Big Read components with a positively unprecedented amount of workplace participation. At least five local corporations distributed books to their employees and invited an especially industrious KCPL librarian to lead office discussions. Kansas City Star arts columnist and book critic Steve Paul, who had already keynoted KC’s kickoff event with a talk about Hemingway’s year as a cub reporter at his newspaper, moderated a reputedly overflow office book group at the international headquarters of Hallmark. (If you see a spate of Hemingwayesque greetings cards in the coming months, feel free to blame the Big Read.) All these so-called “Corporation Big Reads” must’ve gone over well, because every last company involved is already clamoring to know which book — Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, in particular, came up — they want to do next year.

On the Origin of Species, as a work of British nonfiction, won’t be appearing on the Big Read list anytime soon. But its prominent placement in the WWI Museum raises the question of its alleged role in the runup to the war that wounded Hemingway and so many others. It’s an interesting hypothesis, casting a gentle naturalist’s case for the theory of natural selection as the trigger for what became, in its time, probably the bloodiest war in human history. All the combatant countries had considered themselves “naturally selected” for greatness, of course, and assumed that in a war of all against all, they’d surely come out on top. None of them was right.

Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war.” So, did Darwin really help make an even bigger one? Me, I’d hang more of the blame on the British political economist Herbert Spencer. He’s the one who perverted “natural selection” into “survival of the fittest” — a phrase Darwin never used.

But there’s another dimension to all this. Kansas has played host to some of the most contested litigation in recent years over the teaching of evolution. By placing Darwin in one of the very first display cases at the World War I Museum, our docent noted that curators were implicitly defending a book often under attack elsewhere in their state.

Then again, they were also blaming a five-year bloodbath on that same treatise. Books are dicey things, and mean different things to different people. To Kansas City, A Farewell to Arms has meant the chance to come together around a single book in their schools, their libraries, their spectacular new museum and, most originally, around the office water cooler. Only light, not blood, was shed. Arguments broke out in book groups all across town, but no gunplay. To my knowledge, no book discussion has ever ended in violence.

Might make a good novel, though. Watch this space.

November 20, 2007
Attleboro, MA

*Except for Attleboro, MA

Just when you think the news about reading can’t get any more alarming, a statistic comes along that makes you swallow your gum in amazement. According to the NEA’s To Read or Not to Read report landing today, just 31 percent of recent American college graduates tested as “proficient in reading prose” last year. Thirty-one percent! This would have scared the lymph out of me in 1992, when the figure was still a whopping 40%. How did these people get into college, let alone out of it?

Just to take the most obvious ramifications, how are the other 69% even graduating, let alone making their way into the job market? What must the percentage of proficiency be for folks who don’t go to college? And I don’t think I want to know what the figure is for high-school graduates. How do you fill out a college application if you can’t read a page of prose without struggling, never mind write one? Or do young adults read more proficiently at freshman orientation, before all the keggers and the peer pressure and bad academic prose, than on graduation day? As my mother used to say, golly Neds!

“Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,” to quote Sonnet 29, “haply I think on” The Big Read — specifically, a BR finale I parachuted in on last week in Attleboro, Massachusetts. I must’ve liked what I saw, because I took 24 pictures there, and I still take digital pictures as if the roll’s about to run out. (For all the good that does.) As I look back over my makeshift slideshow, the memories come coursing back:

A picture of Attleboro middle-schooler Chantelle Deslauriers holding up her contribution to a glossy, handsomely designed local anthology helps communicate just a little of the electricity crackling the air at the Attleboro Arts Museum’s Reflections of 451 opening. This was hands-down one of the best examples of school participation in a Big Read that I’ve ever seen. Literally hundreds of teenagers, their families and teachers thronged the museum to display the artwork they’d mined from Bradbury’s novel: papier-mache phoenixes suspended from the ceiling, mechanical hounds made out of junked motherboards and scrapyard castoffs, even a giant green foam salamander to match the more sinister one adorning Montag’s fire helmet.

All this, together with clever video walls simulating Mildred’s in the book, and well-rehearsed blackout sketches performed by students on a makeshift stage. It helps to have a good college with a strong education department like Lesley University pitching in on a Big Read, but it helps even more to have energetic co-organizers like Joan Pilkington-Smyth and two “retired” (tell me another one) teachers like Vic and Iona Bonneville leading the charge. Memo to any remaining non-joiners in Attleboro: You can put your phones back on the hook now.

But there’s one more picture from Attleboro that can’t pass without comment. That’s a shot from the next day of the Attleboro Public Library’s 100th anniversary in the same palatial building, taken by me from the podium where I stammered out my not-so-few words of dumbfounded gratitude. In the picture, plainly visible, are the four founders of the library from 1907, impersonated by their inheritors, and stylishly togged out in up-to-the-minute frock coats and hoop skirts. Better yet, I remember their scripted material – so often forced or corny at these sorts of occasions — as genuinely funny. Too bad I didn’t take a picture of my notes while I was at it.

Next stop on my rewind of last week’s Massachusetts-New York swing will probably be White Plains — birthplace of the hoop skirt, incidentally. Will somebody please confiscate my WPA Guide to America before I swallow it whole?

November 9, 2007
New Paltz, NY

Is a backlog of unwritten blog posts a backblog? I’m pinned under a backblog this morning. I’m also lodged under my usual detritus of books, bedding and Big Read paraphernalia — lodging this time in New Paltz, NY, where last night I introduced Dr. Margarite Fernandez Olmos to an engaged audience full of Bless Me, Ultima fans. Speaking on the campus of our capable hosts from SUNY New Paltz, she spun out her idea of chicanismo magico (the Chicano version of magical realism), regularly relating it to her unashamed love of the Harry Potter books. Yes, Antonio and Harry each have an owl as a familiar, but that’s the least of the parallels Dr. Olmos drew.

I hope to go into greater detail about New Paltz in an upcoming post, but for the moment I’m flashing back to something that happened the night before. I was walking down the deserted main drag of Hudson, NY, with Greta Boeringer, the town’s alarmingly tireless librarian and Big Read organizer, after a little public keynote from me about Fahrenheit 451. We were nearing the storefront of the local tourism bureau when we noticed an object resembling a gray ball of yarn on the sidewalk. On closer inspection, it proved an owlet, wide awake and blinking at us from beside a concrete step.

We worried it might be hurt or sick, of course. Mostly it just seemed curious and a little indignant, as if wondering why we weren’t flying from tree to tree as people usually do. Greta and I marveled at it for a minute or two, then felt the usual guilty restlessness in the presence of a potentially transcendent experience that gives no sign of ending anytime soon. We had tiptoed around the owlet and a few steps farther when I remembered the snazzy new camera phone in my pocket. I crept back and snapped the shot you see before you – or would do, if only I could figure out how to pry it out of the phone. That owlet is staring out at me from my phone even now, mulling over why we humans inherited the opposable thumbs and he got all the brains.

I’d felt even stupider the night before in the movie-crazed burg Rochester, NY, where a nearly full house eavesdropped on the film critic and English professor George Grella and me jawing publicly before a screening of The Maltese Falcon. George roughed out a thesis I’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense: Sam Spade knows who killed his partner in the alley all along. Think about it. The explanation Spade cites at the end — Miles “had too many years’ experience as a detective to be caught like that by the man he was shadowing…but he’d've gone up there with you, angel” — represents no more than he knew from the very beginning. Has Spade possibly kept his knowledge of who killed Miles to himself for the whole book, chasing the falcon and dallying with Bridget purely for his own amusement?

I wish I’d thought about that before I spent last weekend in Minneapolis, helping to orient the 15 cities and towns doing the Falcon next spring. These amounted to just a fraction of the 127 new Big Read grantees, whose wiggy, unprecedented ideas all ricocheted around the Minneapolis Hilton like those fireworks in the basement from You Can’t Take It With You. Of the orientation, of the exemplary Falcon read that the Rochester literary center Writers & Books is putting on, of New Paltz and Hudson and all the rest — more later. For now, owl-like, I’m swiveling my head back around toward White Plains this afternoon…

September 25, 2007
Hartland, Michigan

“Road work ahead,” say many of the signs in Michigan — the unofficially nicknamed Orange Barrel State, I’m told — and truer bumblebee-colored words were never posted. So much roadwork will define this blog/job this fall that they aptly combine into one commingled blob.

Oh, I’ll still keep busy driving the office crazy by stetting most of my previous edits in the upcoming round of materials. I’ll still keep trying to distract the Big Read staff from how shamelessly we’re overworking them. I’ll still be kibitzing with Jo Reed on XM Radio till the shellfire of A Farewell to Arms and the hellfire of Fahrenheit 451 go up in twined smoke. (Come to think of it, maybe I won’t be spending quite half my time on The Big Ride after all.)

Today, though, finds me in Hartland, Mich., though not without some searching. As the name suggests, Hartland is a dreamy American town, dappled in fall by torn cloud and nourished this day on burgers, franks, and the Garden Club’s hard, tart, delicious apples. I wish I could say – as I did in remarks to several score assembled Hartlanders – that their Big Read kickoff was timed to boost turnout at their annual Heritage Days festival, with its classic car show and displays of Hartlandia. Alas, skeptical titters suggested vice versa.

Whichever, unfailingly jazzed organizer Carol Taggart’s attendance clicker had passed 500 last time I asked. Entering a raffle earned attendees a chance at some hardcover Bradburies. In addition, this photo I snapped before the camera batteries got thirsty shows a steady stream of locals collecting a paperback Fahrenheit apiece from the hundreds of copies bought and donated by the local paper, the Daily Press & Argus. (Some newspapers still know which side of the next circulation audit their bread is buttered on.)

In case you haven’t twigged to it already, I had a riproaring good time. So, apparently, did Congressman Mike Rogers, tickled over his 13-year-old daughter’s recent disappearance into a Gandhi biography. Also present were a respectful row of lay lobbyists for peace and universal health care, taking Bradbury’s message of free speech proudly to heart. Couple this with all the no less galvanizing Big Read days like this one last spring, and the sign on my way out of town looked wildly inappropriate. “END ROAD WORK”? I’m just getting warmed up…

September 11, 2007
Brunswick, Georgia

If a native of Savannah is a Savannan, is a native of Charlotte a Charlatan? I just flew from one to the other, and in an hour I leave for Washington. Ordinarily it can be tough to do a Big Read justice if I wait beyond the next morning to write up my impressions, but with Brunswick, Georgia, somehow I sense forgetfulness won’t be a problem.

Even if memory flagged, I have snaps of Brunswickians whose industry and enthusiasm even my meager photographic skills can’t obscure. Take Dr. Michael Bull and Al Davis, the superintendent and deputy superintendent of schools, respectively. On opening night’s “Be the Book” kickoff, to embody the novel both would salvage from Bradbury’s flames, each got into the spirit of Fahrenheit 451 by dipping into the closets of their municipal colleagues. Al borrowed a firefighter’s coat to preserve Fahrenheit itself. Dr. Bull hit up his baseball coach to represent Catcher in the Rye — a book, he pointed out, that’s survived its own trials with censorship. No flies on these guys — locals schools have distributed 2,600 copies of Fahrenheit to students in the 8th, 9th and 11th grades.

Local theater director Rob Nixon is working on a production of Fahrenheit, with music by the Athens, Ga.-based, band Kenosha Kid. When I showed off by placing the band name’s allusion to my beloved Gravity’s Rainbow, Rob did me one better by insisting that he’d wanted to dress as a character from Thomas Pynchon’s monumental novel, but ultimately decided in favor of another of his favorites. Using Photoshop to elongate a picture of himself into haggard hideousness, he pinned it onto his chest and topped it off with a sticker bearing the novel’s last line: “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.” Any guesses?

Ringmastering this whole extravaganza was Heather Heath of the Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association, who’s worked so hard masterminding more than a month of events that she only remembered at the last minute to don a makeshift costume of her own: a black pantsuit in mourning for Kurt Vonnegut, with a badge quoting “And so it goes,” the refrain from Slaughterhouse Five. Heather’s husband, Bryan Thompson, invoked mayoral privilege and declined to dress up, but emceed the unexpectedly enjoyable official proclamations with an aplomb befitting his long theater background. Librarian and venturesome First Amendment Film Series programmer Cary Knapp opted for mufti too, but a T-shirt paid tribute to Fahrenheit in its own way. It read, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it. – Mark Twain.”

Local theater director Rob Nixon. Photo by David Kipen

Then it was time for an authentic Low Country Boil, a regional tradition involving local shrimp, sausage, cornbread, sweet potatoes, and long bouts of satisfied groaning. Finally we repaired to the vintage Ritz Theatre for an after-hours peek at The Art of Reading, an exhibit by gifted, resourceful local photog Bobby Haven featuring locals caught reading. Two standouts: the entire high school drill team, going through a routine with books in hand, and a local skateboarder, perusing an unidentified paperback in midair.

And me? Mercifully unphotographed, I nevertheless got caught reading the Federal Writer’s Project’s American Guide again, whose Brunswick entry does it more justice than I have, and in less space. Maybe I’m a charlatan in or out of Charlotte…

September 7, 2007
Washington, DC

“I’ve always liked listening to the radio…That’s one of the reasons why in a lot of my books there’s somebody listening through a wall to somebody talking. Somebody’s always talking in another room. Maybe that’s the radio.” — Ernest J. Gaines

I don’t trust a library without a radio in it. In the Big Read’s book-jammed office right now, I’m listening to Scott Joplin’s “Solace,” marveling at how all his melancholy, plangent numbers mean so much more to me than years ago, when I only had ears for “The Maple Leaf” and Joplin’s other, more upbeat rags.

Radio’s much on my mind these days, since this coming week marks the premiere of The Big Read on XM, our new national weekday show. In case you haven’t heard, XM Satellite Radio is airing each of the Big Read audiobooks in turn, courtesy of Audible, Inc. Each book will be bracketed beforehand by the NEA-produced CD devoted to the novel in question, and after by a roundtable discussion of the book amongst me and a couple-three distinguished fellow readers — all ringmastered by XM Sonic Theater’s book-besotted host, Jo Reed. The first episode airs Monday at 2:30 am, 10:30 am and 4:30 pm Eastern time. (Bear in mind that Pacific time, as we used to say in California, is three hours behind and roughly a decade ahead.)

The first book will be Fahrenheit 451, read by Ray Bradbury himself. Over at XM last week, I joined in a wide-ranging, provocative conversation about Fahrenheit with Readers Circle member Nancy Pearl, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card, XM’s own Kim Alexander, and the sainted Jo. This, plus an interview about the show with XM’s Bob Edwards (taking a holiday from our fortnightly movie chats), and a few extra minutes of me jawing about the Big Read in general. All in all, not a bad way to get the word out to those few scattered Americans not yet doing a Big Read or following this blog with fanatical zeal.

Carson McCullers

The Big Read on XM represents just the latest chapter in the long, happy marriage of radio and literature. Dan Brady wrote in this space the other day about the recurrence of bridge-playing in several of our books, but radio may be even more pervasive. Most famously, Bradbury presents radio in Fahrenheit as an insidious force, anticipating the Walkmen and iPods with his descriptions of “seashell” or “thimble” radios “tamped into” oppressed citizens’ ears. More benevolent are characterizations of radio in both The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which classical music broadcasts become Mick’s solace and salvation, and A Lesson Before Dying, where Jefferson’s jailhouse radio gives him one tenuous nighttime connection to the outside world.

These two literary uses of radio strike me as ultimately truer to life than Bradbury’s cautionary one — though radio’s visual inheritors have a lot more to answer for. Unlike later electronic media, radio (whether delivered via satellite, computer, or crystal set) has one crucial thing in common with literature. It cultivates the very skill that too many educators today find alarmingly absent from their classrooms: the ability of students to make up their own pictures…

September 4, 2007
Washington, DC
“I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths.”
–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Have you heard the good news? According to the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll, 1 in 4 Americans didn’t read a book last year. Drinks on me!

Er…what? This news doesn’t make you want to, in the words of my Beverly Vista Elementary math teacher, throw down your plates and dance in the mashed potatoes? Then look closer. Five years ago — according to the NEA’s Reading at Risk study — fewer than one in two Americans could answer yes to the question “Did you read a book for pleasure in the last year?” Now it’s down — up? — to one in four. Up, down or sideways, the upshot is this: The proportion of Americans who don’t read has shrunk in half.

Or not. Statistics are dodgy enough when you’re comparing studies derived from the exact same questionnaire, let alone two different ones. Ultimately, statistics only get you so far, because they’re numbers and not stories.

Ray Bradbury

Take the fast-proliferating statistics about American newspaper readership, and their implicit consequences for reading itself. Does it ultimately matter to anybody but a newspaper publisher whether circulation is “trending downward,” hemorrhaging like a hemophiliac, or merely gaining ground too slowly to satisfy Wall Street? There’s a fire going on, and the statistics tell us nothing memorable that we don’t already suspect. What we do remember, because Bradbury found the words to make it stick, is Faber in Fahrenheit 451 saying, “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths.” All the stats in the world don’t scare me as much as that one forbidding, foreboding sentence.

Likewise, whatever the crests or troughs or spikes say, reading is down. The rest is footnotes. I bow deeply before NEA Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar, without whose rigorous studies and evaluations the Big Read couldn’t even get down the driveway. He has another reading study due this fall that will likely scare the daylights out of you. But in the end, Sunil worries about the numbers so that we can worry about the books — ironic, since he used to write terrific book reviews for me at the San Francisco Chronicle. We can’t get so caught up with debatable fluctuations in reading numbers that we lose sight of a crisis almost nobody denies.

All of which by way of saying, it’s a long season. The Dodgers won yesterday, but they’re still four games behind with a month to play. The Big Read team is winning big, to judge by Sunil’s local evaluations, but we’re still way behind, and nobody knows how much of the season is left. With Labor Day now behind us, dozens of Fall 2007 Big Reads are now under sail in cities and towns across America. The home office is already steaming ahead with even bigger plans for next year. Me, I’m going into an XM Radio studio today to record a roundtable conversation about Fahrenheit 451 for their Big Read Show, which premieres nationwide on September 10.

All this information is what any self-respecting statistician would call anecdotal, but anecdotes are stories, and stories tell. Without them, statistics are just numbers. If you really want to hash around conflicting interpretations of something infinitely complex, read a book…

July 19, 2007
Washington, DC

“Mom, which one of us do you love best?” It’s a question my mother would never answer, but each of us had our suspicions — depending on which of us had just pitched marbles into her demitasse set (oldest brother), taken the pinking shears to her hand-sewn curtains to see the zig-zag pattern (me), or scratched his name backward — to avoid detection — into the hallway wall (older brother). Still, despite moments of being in or out of favor, none of us ever earned a declared status of favorite.

I don’t have children. I do, however, at middle age, have a child’s habit of secretly personifying inanimate objects — such as books. My husband has caught on to this, and while not suggesting therapy outright, he has hinted that this is something I should have gotten over somewhere between Barbie and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

It’s not as if I stand in the stacks and have conversations with Louisa May Alcott. But I have been known to look at a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and whisper, “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum,” by way of a greeting. To the book.

And yet, I am able to drive a car and hold a responsible job. Go figure.

I am the Director of Communications here at the National Endowment for the Arts, and it’s my department that tells the world about the Big Read, among our many other worthy NEA endeavors.

To me, while a book, a song, a painting, or a — wait for it — Broadway musical may not have a beating heart or knowing brain, it has a life. One that affects my life. Unlike my mother, I am able to pick favorites. (But keep this to yourselves. I don’t want The Wizard of Earthsea to feel bad that I like The Age of Innocence better.) I spend as much time with novels as I do with friends. And when I put one down, I need a day or two before I’m ready to pick up another. I need some time to reflect on our conversation. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye.

Of all our Big Read books, I do have a favorite. It’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve read and reread it. I’ve watched and rewatched the movie. I named my cat Atticus. (I said I don’t have children.)

I’ve read some of the learned arguments about why it doesn’t really deserve its vaunted position in the American literary cannon. From Tom Mallon’s 2006 New Yorker essay: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound…”, to Truman Capote’s alleged, “I, frankly, don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Although I’m a fan of both Mallon and Capote, I don’t care what they say. To Kill a Mockingbird is my sentimental favorite.

It’s a book I first read somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. It’s the book that took me from The Hardy Boys (I just never could get into Nancy Drew — even if Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were the same person) and Little Women into the world of grown up literature — a trip I wasn’t that eager to make.

I confess fully and ashamedly to being a lazy child. Always doing what was required and no more, and if there were a way I could do less, I would–including reading. I was happy to read — I just didn’t want to work at it. (Embarrassing disclosure: the first time I read Call of the Wild was in a Classic Comic Book.) And I was happier to watch I Love Lucy reruns than I was to read.

It was my marble-pitching oldest brother — one of those so-smart-he-skipped-a-grade overachievers who handed me his paperback copy of Mockingbird and said, “Read this.” I did. Then he gave me The Yearling. I read that. Then The Member of the Wedding. Then A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then 0 Pioneers! Then Country of the Pointed Firs. Then The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Then eventually Tom Jones and all of Jane Austen. (Okay, I also read Valley of the Dolls and Love Story but I swear I never picked up Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I expanded into plays reading all of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams.

And yes, I talk to them all. Including in dialects, where appropriate. I can’t help it. And to be honest, I don’t want to. The characters in these books are as real to me as my childhood imaginary friend, Judy.

With the Big Read, our goal may not be a nation of readers conversing with their little friends from literature, but it is bringing the joy of discovery of good books — and good friends — to people who either have forgotten that simple pleasure or who never have had the pleasure. We are eager to have people experience the possibilities of language and storytelling, the fun of discussing, agreeing and disagreeing, the power of broadened perspective and of new conversations and conversions.

Reading moved Montag from being a “fire man” to a thinking man. If I lived in Ray Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, I would go into the woods and memorize To Kill a Mockingbird. From “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…,” to “…and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” And then Scout, Judy, and I would go talk about it some more….