December 28, 2007
Washington, DC

My draft of the Tom Sawyer Reader’s Guide is due in mid-January, so I’ve got Twain on the brain. Each of our guides contains a few choice quotations from the author in question. The problem with Twain, naturally, is keeping the number of possible quotables somewhere down in the low hundreds.

Today I’m kicking myself for not bringing in my copy of the new book Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. I just dipped into this chrestomathy last night, and of course Twain is good for at least a dozen or more entries. Plus, NEA Media Arts Director Ted Libbey just walked in here and put in a good word for his favorite: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Me, I’ve always had a soft spot for, “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” Here are a few more contenders, along with an observation or two for or against:

“‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.” — Like many of the great Twain apothegms, this one comes from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. It’s certainly appropriate to The Big Read, but maybe a mite too defeatist for our purposes.

“Each person is born with one possession which outvalues all his others — his last breath.” I’ve never seen this one before. It captures well the peculiar Twain morbidity that makes almost every laugh sting — as does the following:

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” That’s vintage Twain, pure black metaphor, without the usual dusting of comedy this time. I’ll never look at the night sky in quite the same way.

Yet none of these plums may make it into the Reader’s Guide, which generally runs to quotes either about writing or taken from the book at hand. Not that Tom Sawyer is any slouch in the quotability department, mind you. Just rereading the book this week, I’ve come across several that loom as Reader’s Guide timber:

“Rules governing literary art require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” That’s from Twain’s takedown of Last of the Mohicans author James Fenimore Cooper, and there are 18 other rules where that came from. I urge you to seek them out at http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/wilson/pwequat.html.

“She would be sorry some day — maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die temporarily!” In his two most enduring books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its habitually underrated partner, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, both title characters essentially attend their own funerals. To paraphrase Ian Fleming: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action. For Twain to use this scenario twice attests to the spell it always held over him. That he could use it to create two such different moods — robustly comic for Tom, “powerful lonesome” for Huck — only confirms his incomparable gift.

“There were some that believed [Tom] would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.” Here is Tom Sawyer in a snapshot: half Eagle Scout, half outlaw. This rift may better reflect Twain himself than even the more famous, better-realized character of Huck. The presidential Tom feels closer to the man Twain’s wife wanted him to be: upstanding, honorable, well-liked, romantic. It’s mainly away from Livy that we get the other Twain, the one closer to Huck, the bad boy at the cotillion.

The final apportioning of Twain quotes awaits the first draft of my guide next month, but the foregoing should give some earnest of the happy hell I’m in, trying to pick and choose which aspects to emphasize of this titanic, protean, Janus-faced genius. The language here is deliberately mythic, as befits a man whose influence still shadows American literature a hundred years later. I can’t wait to get on the road next fall and see what 21st-century America makes of him…

Time this morning to try something new to the blog: its first notes column. Gone the usual carefully developed arguments, the lovingly re-created site visits. In their stead, a grab bag of ideas, observations, three-dot items, IOUs for longer posts, and generally whatever crosses my mind. Serve me right if a couple-three quick takes, rather than another indigestible embolus of bloviation, gets more hits than anything in weeks…

For example, there are officially no shipping days left till Christmas — or at least, not for any out-of-town friends or relatives. That shopping ship has sailed, replaced by guilt, recriminations, and pledges to do better next year. Unless, that is, you take my new-minted advice and call a well-stocked independent bookstore near those last far-flung names on your shopping list. Browse around at your local store or online first, but then ring up long-distance and charge a book or two right around the corner from the recipient in question. Then get in touch with the giftee and tell them where their present awaits.

This obliges them to leave the house, of course, but it’s also easier than tracking down the shipping address in question, and it’s good for their local indie. Might even inspire your pal to polish off some last-minute shopping of their own in the same establishment. Mind you, I haven’t actually tried this myself yet, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work. I don’t know about you — I sure wouldn’t mind a holiday call from kith or kin telling me there’s a paid-for, maybe even gift-wrapped something waiting on that ever-enticing shelf behind the counter…

And didja notice, as Herb Caen or Jack Smith might’ve said on a slow day, that Joyce Carol Oates has just edited Best American Essays of the Century? (Insert obligatory hardest-working-woman-in-literature joke here.) Christina Nehring over at truthdig.com pointed this collection out, and I’m grateful for it. A logical follow-up to Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike a few years back, this one contains work by everybody from John Muir to Joan Didion, plus no fewer than four Big Read authors.

The latter pieces in question are “A Drugstore in Winter,” Cynthia Ozick’s reminiscence of her family’s apothecary shop in the Bronx; “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s account of his nervous breakdown; “Pamplona in July,” Ernest Hemingway on the running of the bulls, a subject he wrote about much more famously in The Sun Also Rises; “Corn-pone Opinions,” yet another in Mark Twain’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of brilliant toss-offs we’ve never even heard of; Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” a mainstay of our Big Read materials; plus Alice Walker’s canon-exploding essay about Hurston, “Looking for Zora,” just for lagniappe. (By the way, following Updike’s lead, Oates has included one of her own pieces in her collection. If I am not for myself, quoth Rabbi Hillel, who will be for me?) There are also century collections of sports and mystery writing out by now, but so far no 100-year floods for the same publisher’s spiritual and travel writing collections, and certainly none yet for Dave Eggers’ comparatively overnight perennial chrestomathy, Best American Nonrequired Reading. And Best American Book Reviews? Keep waiting…

I could go on, but word limit and deadline are creeping up on me in their uncanny perpetual tango. Did this disorganized impromptu grab bag (or, considering there’s only two items, coinflip?) pass the time agreeably? Or should I go back to my wonted one-hobbyhorse-per-blog format when post time rolls around again next Tuesday? Answers to kipend@arts.gov, and may your holiday be filled with rectangular packages…

December 18, 2007
Washington, DC

Pretty soon they’re going to have to start a special portion of the paper devoted exclusively to alarming news about reading. Can’t you just imagine it? Right between BUSINESS DAY, PAGE C1, and SCIENCE TIMES, PAGE D1, please turn to KISS LITERACY GOODBYE!, SPECIAL ILLUSTRATED SECTION.

First came the NEA’s elegiac To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (http://www.arts.gov/research/ToRead.pdf). This delivered the cheering news that, the less you read, the likelier you are to wind up jobless, in jail, and funny-looking.

Then, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the paper, today brings tidings that J.K. Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic, has commissioned a series of books called The 39 Clues, written by a tag-team of young-adult writers and augmented by a formidable online onslaught of “web-based games, collectors cards and cash prizes.” According to writer Rick Riordan, who will inaugurate the series come September with The Maze of Bones, “Some kids are always going to prefer games over books. But if you can even reach a few of those kids and give them an experience with a novel that makes them think, ‘Hey, reading can be another way to have an adventure,’ then that’s great. Then I’ve done my job.”

Way to aim high, Rick. This news item is also notable for its “Law & Order”-ization of creativity. Just as that TV show pioneered the interchangeability of actors as a way of lowering the price of popular talent, Scholastic appears eager to sell books without writers, or at least without the recurring name recognition that makes writers so all-fired expensive.

It only gets better. Also according to this morning’s paper, 545 writers have just sent a letter to 10 Downing Street imploring Prime Minister Gordon Brown to mandate at least an hour per schoolday of reading instruction. Reportedly, one-fifth of 11-year olds leave primary school without meeting the minimum level of reading competence. (No word on how students are faring on their O-levels, or tripos, or other mysterious British academic hurdles that are fun to say.) “As authors” — per signatories including the versatile genre writer Ian Rankin, poet laureate Andrew Motion, underrated god Nick Hornby, and the inarguably literate Jackie Collins — “we are deeply concerned at the low levels of childhood literacy across Britain.

When reading is tanking in England, traditionally the lone holdout with steady reading rates among industrialized nations, it’s definitely time to muster the militia. Hence the less than imaginative, but forgivably necessary, title of today’s blogpost. The Big Read isn’t going to solve this country’s reading crisis overnight, or even singlehandedly. But it’s a start, and — take it from someone who’s seen more Big Reads up close than anyone else has, or is ever likely to — it works. That’s why I urge every city or town within reach of this blog to pull together an application by Feb. 12, 2008. If you’ve never done a citywide reading program, where everybody in town reads the same book for a month and hashes it out six ways from Sunday, The Big Read is your perfect bunny slope. And if you’ve done one but want to do it better, then The Big Read offers a nearly surefire way to roll it up a notch. Aside from the many communities who come to us for the first time, it would be interesting to tabulate who re-applies to us more: Big Read towns who’ve never given it a go solo, or the cities who’ve both gone it alone and thrown it their lot with us, and recognize how much easier it is to undertake something like this with a little help.

Either way, here at the NEA we hope all the Big Read rookies out there won’t sit back and let the re-uppers have all the fun. It’s easy and just one click away at http://www.neabigread.org/application_process.php

And now, pardon me while I get back to work writing the Mark Twain readers’ guide, coming this fall to a city or town near you…

Translation is both the most parasitic form of writing and the purest. It’s writing without storytelling, without plot, or character, or any of the other gifts that only a few lucky fictioneers have it in them to deploy. No, translation is writing at its most elemental linguistic level, with the kit provided and only the words missing. It belongs alongside singing or acting or symphony conducting — an interpretive art, but no less an art for all that. Translation is what painting by numbers would be, if only the painter had as many colors handy as there are words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Is it Tolstoy… or Tolstoy?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I just finished up a translating project from the Spanish, but also because we only recently got our Tolstoy materials back from the printer and the CD presser. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich marks our first novel in translation — chosen for a reciprocal Read with the Russian cities of Saratov and Ivanovo, who’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird this fall while five American cities and towns prepare to tackle Tolstoy next spring.

Because we had to agree on a common translation just for consistency’s sake, we went with Lynn Solotaroff’s Bantam edition, but no preference or endorsement should be inferred. So long as folks are on roughly the same page, I kind of like the idea of multiple readers around the country getting together over different translations, comparing notes and discovering anew how even the tiniest decisions of diction and syntax can make all the difference.

Just look at the last line of Solotaroff’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Spoiler alert here, by the way, for anybody who expects Ivan to live happily ever after.) Solotaroff translates Ivan Ilyich’s end as, “He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out and died.” It seems a fairly straightforward sentence, one whose original Russian couldn’t possibly allow for that many variations.Now look at Louise and Aylmer Maude’s once-standard translation of the same sentence: “He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.” At first blush, they seem more or less the same sentence twice. Each starts with the same five words, and each ends with the same two.

In between, though, discrepancies creep in. Per Solotaroff, Ivan dies in the middle of his last breath. But according the Maudes, Ivan completes the breath, and only dies while sighing afterward. I tend to prefer the first version, since that one doesn’t oblige poor Ivan to breathe and then sigh, two operations that seem a little too similar to be readily separable. Points to Solotaroff here.

But now look at the other divergence. The Maudes have Ivan simply stretching out, whereas Solotaroff’s Ivan stretches himself out — as if there were anyone else Ivan might conceivably be stretching. Points to the Maudes here, and so a split decision overall.

Which one is closer to Tolstoy’s original? Which the more literal? And are they the same thing? You’d have to ask a Russian speaker for those answers, but the translators are presumably fluent, and it didn’t keep them from preparing subtly different interpretations. Still, each retains the indispensable idea of a life interrupted.

My translation work so far hews toward the irreverent, making free with a lot of colloquialism, anachronism, and general puckishness. My Spanish isn’t the greatest, either, so I probably couldn’t be slavishly faithful to the original if I tried.

Maybe most important, I’m translating a comic short story and novella by Cervantes and Cervantine comedy lends itself to a more timeless, postmodern tone than Tolstoyan solemnity. I’m hoping that readers can hear a Spanish magistrate say “I’m hauling you in” without thinking, “Hmmm. Would a 17th-century Englishman even say that?” By contrast, though, nobody wants to read The Plotzing of Ivan Ilyich.

Nobody besides me, anyway…

December 11, 2007
Baltimore, MD

As Herman Glogauer of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime would say, the “beauty part” of The Big Read is that it keeps outstripping anything we can mastermind for it. Right now we’re piloting a possible extension of TBR into what I have to keep reminding myself are called correctional facilities. The thinking around here goes that, while we’re working at getting Americans to read – something hardly anybody would dream of arguing with — we should also make time to do something for as friendless a population as you can name, i.e., people in prison.

Only hitch is, anything we can think of here in the office, Big Read organizers have already improvised out there on the hustings. Quite a few Big Reads have already incorporated some kind of correctional component, including the prison arts workshop in Canton, Ill., that created a remarkable 6-foot papier-mache copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (A Cantonese Big Read, October 12th, 2007).

So yesterday, when I took the train — up? down? over? — to Baltimore for a presentation to a conference of state arts agencies, who did I meet but a woman who’s already ringmastered a successful Big Read prison partnership? This was Catherine Richmond-Cullen, who as part of a Grapes of Wrath read in Scranton, Pa., brought Steinbeck’s novel – about, lest we forget, Tom Joad’s release from the graybar hotel and his attempt to make it on the outside – to a readership primed to appreciate it as few others ever have.

Take it from Catherine, none of this will ever be easy. Most prison regulations forbid giving inmates so much as a PostIt, which means you can’t exactly leave them books to read between visits. Also, prison regs are notoriously changeable, so that something a visiting facilitator could do one week may well be against the rules the next. Makes it kind of tricky to plan a curriculum. Also, as the NEA’s recent To Read or Not to Read study demonstrates, most felons tend not to be very big readers in the first place. Not to put too fine a point on it, the majority of prisoners can’t read, or not above a third-grade level.

Still, somehow, dedicated people like Catherine and Natalie Costa Thill, who does terrific writing workshops with prisoners in the Adirondacks, find ways to get inmates reading and writing. They do it with guided reading, where the fluent readers help nonfluent ones keep up. They do it with peer writing, where the literate prisoners help write for those who can’t. It all pays off, not least when the smartest inmates, who — as in school — are often the biggest discipline problems, suddenly become model prisoners for fear of losing their workshop privileges.

Here, amid the, ahem, artful chiaroscuro of this photo, Catherine is showing off some quotes from prisoners about The Grapes of Wrath. The one that stays with me is the guy who wrote about Steinbeck’s desert tortoise – the one that creeps across Route 66, gets sideswiped off onto the shoulder, and then just climbs back out and resumes his crawl. “The turtle,” this prisoner wrote, “reminds me of myself: hard shell – and a soft underside.” If this guy, reading literature for only a few sanctioned minutes a week, can recognize himself and his world in it, what excuse do the rest of us have not to?

December 7, 2007
Washington, DC

Recently, a colleague was in my office and we were talking about our exposure to books as children. I mentioned that even though neither of my parents had attended college (my dad went later in life on the GI Bill), books were highly prized and everywhere in my home growing up. She said, “Ah, then your parents were bookworms.” Her choice of words reminded me that when I was about six or seven, my parents enrolled me in “The Bookworm Club”, a summer reading program at the Camden Public Library in Camden, Maine.

In the early 60s, before its award-winning 1996 underground expansion, the library was relatively small. A beautiful brick building on a hill overlooking perhaps one of the worlds’s most photographed harbors. To a pre-electronic age six-year-old, the interior of the Camden Public Library was like something out of a …book. High ceilings with tall windows that cast long beams of sunlight across hardwood floors, long wooden tables with low lights, high-backed wooden chairs, card catalogues clustered at the center of the main room, and behind the central desk the ever present, ever pleasant librarian, Nellie Hart.

Each Saturday through the summer, we’d go and select a couple of new books. My first selection was Tim Tadpole and the Great Bull Frog. (How is it, I can remember this, and yet I can’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday?) Another favorite was Hercules, the story of a horse-drawn fire engine who felt his days were numbered as the “horseless carriages” came to town. Perhaps this is where my personification of books began. (See blog entry July 20, 2007) As further enhancement to these stories, my brothers helped me capture tadpoles in the pond behind our house and my dad took me to see the Molyneaux, a horse-drawn fire engine on display at the Camden Fire Department.

A trip to the public library got me: free books, time with my family, stories to read, and subsequent adventures to learn more about what was in the books. I loved The Book Worm Club and all that came with it — including a wooden, black and orange bookworm pin. And in this, I am not unique. As we saw in the release of the NEA’s analysis, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, little kids love to read. They love the new adventures that are opened to them through books. It’s like when you graduate from your tricycle (and mine was metal with streamers, not one of those new-fangled Big Wheels. What? Those aren’t new? Well, they’re fangled.) to a bicycle and you’re allowed to ride beyond the driveway. No one has to drive you or walk you holding your hand. You can go places! Books can give anyone the same freedom and thrilling joy of discovery at any age. I was lucky enough to have a whole family holding my hand to get me started so that when they let go, I was able to go places on my own.

I like to think of the Big Read as a giant Bookworm Club. Looking across the country at our hundreds of Big Read communities and the programming that they’ve put in place to enhance the reading experience of these great novels, I am certain that people of all ages will have similar awe-inspiring moments tied to a good book. Some may even get a pin.

December 5, 2007
Perry, IA

Last night I saw a waterfall of corn. It was almost midnight, and I was driving through cornfields in Iowa. Since it is autumn, the farmers were working late into the night, taking every advantage of the dry weather to harvest the corn. The tractor lights were blazing so brightly that I remembered a line from Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: “Nearly always the sky was a glassy, brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright.” As the corn descended from the combine’s auger into the wagon and the lights shone through it, the kernels glimmered like gold coins in a pirate’s treasure chest.

Carlos Dews gives the keynote for Hometown Perry Iowa’s Big Read. Photo by Iris Coffin

This is not an everyday sight for me — a Los Angeles native living outside of Washington, DC, on her first trip to Iowa. The leaders of Hometown Perry Iowa, a museum that celebrates small town immigrant life, invited me to attend their Big Read kick-off, where scholar and professor Carlos Dews gave the keynote lecture about Carson McCullers’ life and art.

Carlos and I enjoyed long drives and several meals with the organizers of Iowa’s only Big Read for this grant cycle. There were even Reader’s Guides in the waiting room of the Mexican restaurant where we had lunch! With Bill Clark, Iris Coffin, Donna Emmert, Kathy Lenz, and Mayor Viivi Shirley, we spent many hours talking about the novel and speculating about possible reasons why a rural Iowa town was the only Big Read community to have chosen McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Certainly the novel is dark. The characters are flawed, struggling, and often unlikable. The line between survival and despair remains perilously thin for these strong yet fragile creatures. But anyone who has experienced what Emily Dickinson described as the “formal feeling” that comes “after great pain” can appreciate the plight of McCullers’ six main characters.

I’ve never heard anyone identify The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as a love story, but for me, this is its most poignant theme. Until talking with Carlos, I had never considered the novel’s theme of faith. Amid all the tragedy, McCullers might seem to mock hope. Love, faith, and hope: but the greatest of these is love, says the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. A close look may reveal that the novel reflects all three.

The novel begins, “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” There seems no literary precedent for a protagonist like John Singer-a patient, thoughtful man and the town’s jeweler. His companion is a Greek named Antonapoulos, who is a rude, selfish glutton. Singer talks with his hands, but Antonapoulos rarely turns his head. Even “Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him.”

This is not a familiar love story. Similar to Flannery O’Connor, McCullers paints such peculiar characters, partly to demonstrate a clearer definition of love, one that is atypical and seemingly implausible. How rarely do we witness-not to mention give or receive-love freely bestowed without any intimation of sacrifice! When his companion is taken away from him, Singer is impoverished. At the end of a letter, Singer says of Antonapoulos, “the way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.” The presence of all the townspeople is no substitute for the man he calls his “only friend.” If we wonder what John Singer “gets” out of this relationship, we have missed the point.

During the Kick-off presentation, Carlos read a passage from McCullers’ other work The Ballad of the Sad Café to further illuminate her view of love:

The fact that [love] is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. …. [The lover] feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. …The beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love. …The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. …A most mediocre person can be the object of love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. …. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

We don’t often think of the solitariness of love; we like to think of it as union. But in McCullers’ world, the heart that loves is destined to further loneliness, to further hunting.

The hunt itself, this quest for something elusive, requires faith. In the same way that Antonapoulos seems unresponsive to John Singer, so Singer hardly responds to his neighbors. He doesn’t initiate friendship or conversations, although he seems to embrace both. The five other main characters visit Singer’s room frequently, often repeating their stories to him. They never know what he really thinks. Of this, Carlos Dews observed, “What makes faith faith is that you don’t necessarily get any messages back from prayer or worship. Faith comes from the belief that someone is listening to what you are saying. That’s what John Singer is for many of these characters. He’s deaf and mute, so they simply have to believe he’s listening.”

A question that repeated like a fugue in Perry concerned the ending: Is there any hope by the novel’s last page? Part of the answer lies in the novel’s final sentence- “He composed himself soberly to await the morning sun.” Despite John Singer’s physical inability to speak, Biff Brannon might be the novel’s most mute character. This lonely restaurant owner silently serves the town’s misfits. Everyone else who visits Singer talks incessantly, but not Biff. After the death of his wife, he doesn’t confide in anyone. He is eccentric, solitary, and oddly infatuated with Mick Kelley. Yet at the very end, the O’Connor-like “moment of grace” is given to Biff-an ordinary, isolated man left to plan the novel’s final funeral, who is bereft of anyone to love. Despite his loneliness, perhaps because of his quietly tragic life, McCullers ends her novel with Biff Brannon.

Perry, Iowa, is encouraging others to read a novel that, for me, is ultimately about those three greatest things: faith, hope, and love. It asks us to cherish love more fiercely when it is found, to possess faith in what cannot be seen, and to await the rays of the morning sun.

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.