July 23, 2007
Washington, DC

While tabulating responses to our survey of teenagers’ favorite books, I’ve been thinking what I’d do if I ever found myself in front of a teenage English class for a semester — besides panic, that is. This is where my trusty know-it-all megalomania comes in handy. Here, drawing on all the classroom expertise that seven years as newspaperman and two as an arts administrator have afforded me, is my notion:

On the first day of class, I’d challenge each student to name a book he likes. No fudging, no sucking up, just any book. Gatsby, Danielle Steele, X-Men — I don’t care. Each kid’s first assignment would just be to tell the class why they ought to read it too, thereby helping develop those powers of argumentation. Then the class votes, and whichever book polls highest becomes the first assignment on an otherwise blank syllabus. (So it’s an alternative school, OK? Work with me.)

Say the class picks some Robert Ludlum thriller. Onto the syllabus it goes. The class reads it, I read it, the kid who championed it re-reads it. Over a week we talk about whether Ludlum creates suspense effectively or not, whether his characters sound real or don’t, whether he nails the ending or doesn’t, quite.

We now return the class to its regularly scheduled taskmaster, i.e., me. For Lesson 2, I suggest a slightly older, slightly better thriller. Some Frederick Forsyth, maybe, or Michael Crichton’s Binary, written under the pen name John Lange.

Lesson 3: Something short, but with a little more meat on its bones. Maybe John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

Lesson 4: A vintage American mystery, like the Big Read’s own Maltese Falcon.

Lesson 5: A classic proto-thriller, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda or John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Lesson 6: The original and still best geopolitical mistaken-identity thriller of all time: A Tale of Two Cities.

This way, we’ve taken them from Robert Ludlum, via Dashiell Hammett, all the way to Dickens in just one semester. Similarly, if the class picks Danielle Steele, maybe regress them through Gone With the Wind to Little Women to Henry James’s Washington Square, which is joining the Big Read in fall 2008. If they pick an X-Men comic, take them back through H.G. Wells to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Jules Verne. If they pick Harry Potter, walk them down the years past the Big Read’s A Wizard of Earthsea to The Hobbit.

The point is, let them pick the first book on the syllabus, then follow it back through the genealogy of literature wherever it leads. This way they’ll have a stake in the assigned reading, since they indirectly picked it. Start them cold with Dickens or Alcott, and they might not stick around for Ludlum or Steele.

Believe me, I know how impractical this all is. Feel free to file it under “unsolicited advice, passed along just to vent.” But if somebody had put me on to Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al when I was 8 when Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was my favorite book, I would have discovered classic American literature a whole lot sooner…

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….

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …