August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

August 9, 2007
Washington, DC

No two people ever read the same book. Partly, this is because few people ever read the same two books in a row. Every book we read, we also read juxtaposed against the book before and the one after.

For example, if you read the first 21st-century novel on the Big Read list, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, back to back with Big Read mainstay The Joy Luck Club, you might come away reflecting on the ways two very different short story writers have transmuted a few rudiments of their personal histories into their first acknowledged novels. (Wolff had a rookie effort he’s not real proud of.) But if you read a doubleheader of Old School and, to pick another Big Read title, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, what jumps out at you might be how two self-deceiving male protagonists look back on their lives and justify their mistakes.

The Banned Authors monument in Berlin. Source: Flickr

I mention this because the importance of reading juxtaposition also goes for newspaper articles. Here’s a quote from a piece in the August issue of The Hill Rag, a better than average neighborhood newspaper here in town, about D.C.’s retooled Southeast Branch Library:

[Some readers, like Friends of Southeast Library’s] Wendy Blair, believe the Southeast collection now suffers from citywide library policies that sell readers short. “The idea that a library is a repository of the books you can’t buy or keep at home seems to have been shelved,” said Blair. “And the choice of which books — lots of Danielle Steele, no Jane Austen — seems sad.”

Taken by itself, this is interesting enough. It recalls the flurry of attention in the Washington Post and elsewhere last year when it came out that a Virginia library system was weeding its holdings based on circulation numbers. (Sadly needless to add, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and many other American classics were taking it on the chin.)

Now, watch what happens when you read that Hill Rag graf alongside this, from a recent issue of the South Jersey Courier-Post:

“The [school] board also passed a resolution affirming the use of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in the high school English curriculum. The vote was 6-2…A committee reviewed the novel, which details the lives of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, after a resident complained of passages described as sexual in nature.”

This, too, shouldn’t shock anybody who’s already noticed the curriculum wars bedeviling American school districts lately. But read it within a few days of that library-weeding piece, and it gives rise to the following modest proposal:
What would happen if an American library user (or parent) challenged a book, not on grounds of obscenity, or sacrilege, or any of the other reasons usually trotted out with the best of intentions — but because the book stinks?

Put another way, what if somebody challenged any of the widely read but unspectacular novelists whom libraries regularly stock in quintuplicate, solely because the potboiler is just flat-out not as good as the one copy of Sense and Sensibility it would displace?

Whoa, you say. Doesn’t that put local boards in the position of making subjective judgments? Yes — but that’s exactly what they’re already doing! Deciding whether a book qualifies as profane or blasphemous is every bit as subjective as weighing in on its literary value.

Unlike “appropriateness challenges,” though, “quality challenges” would get cities and towns talking about what really matters in literature, e.g., how much fun it is, how interesting it can be to talk about, how good language can work a reader over on frequencies, and at depths, that nothing else can quite reach. That, or it’ll make a mockery of book challenges altogether, which might not be so bad either. Either way, it’ll get people talking about books in terms of how good or bad they are, in addition to how godless or dirty.

All I’m saying is, if somebody else gets to challenge a venturesome book because the sight of it makes them want to cover their eyes, then I should have the same privilege because a bad book makes me want to hold my nose. Whether I have that privilege, we’ll find out when I visit the Southeast Library this week and try to challenge the worst book I can find…