May 8, 2009
Kelleys Island, OH

Kelleys Island, Ohio, did it. They did it. Everybody on this small, ice-locked Lake Erie island — but everybody — read To Kill a Mockingbird last month, all 134 of them. What started as a reckless challenge I tossed out at last year’s Big Read orientation turned into local pledge, then a countywide sensation, and eventually a low-grade international human-interest story, with reporters as far away as the Manchester Guardian and Russia weighing in on the festivities. For an isolated island, the simple act of reading a book sure brought a little piece of the world to its doorstep. It all culminated in a justly proud celebration last Thursday at the high school gym, where islander after islander took the microphone to thank their neighbors for daring them to do this.

A mere fraction of all 134 Kelleys Islanders who read To Kill a Mockingbird, plus one very relieved ringer in the last row. Photo by Luke Wark

Naturally, one big human-interest story on Kelleys Island is only the sum of 134 individual ones. To keep things in perspective, let’s just zoom in on one: the mayor, friendly Robert Quinn, who hesitantly took the stage and admitted to his constituents that safeguarding the public interest usually leaves him little time for pleasure reading. “I haven’t read a book in a long time,” he said, sheepish. “Probably” – sotto voce here — “30 years.”

Now, in a perfect world, a local chief executive’s confession that book-reading isn’t his bag might be grounds for impeachment. But in this fallen one, neighbors just nodded knowingly as he enumerated the two principal hurdles he’d found in cracking his first novel since high school: “For me, the biggest challenge was just getting started … The second biggest challenge was putting names to faces.”

In these challenges, I suspect Mayor Quinn isn’t alone. Even the most readerly among us know that reading a book represents a time commitment, and this can make getting started a little daunting. And a simple thing like keeping all the characters straight, when you’re out of practice and used to more visual forms of entertainment, can make even Mockingbird feel like Crime and Punishment.

So I’m more impressed than ever that all those Kelleys Islanders found the time and concentration to make room for a book in their lives. When I started this blog, I scarcely dared hope that someday I’d find myself in league with Big Read volunteers as dedicated as Elaine Lickfelt and reading professionals as enthusiastic as Sandusky County Library’s Terri Estel.  Without them, I’d certainly never have made my foolhardy vow to eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if Kelleys Island fell short of 100% participation.

Now, my optimism and my G.I. tract have both been spared. The only question now is, what next? A couple hundred new grantees will pour into Minneapolis next month to swap ideas about how to make Kelleys Island’s success their own. What new ridiculous challenge can I throw out for some unwary city or town to take up? Can every last soul in a designated Big Read town get a library card? Can everybody memorize a fraction of The Great Gatsby, or The Shawl, or whatever their local book might be, so that together they can recite the whole thing? The silly possibilities are endless, but the mission remains unchanged: Get America reading again.

Consider the suggestion box open…

May 7, 2008
Cleveland, OH

Cleveland, Ohio’s Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio (YANEO) partnered with Warrensville Heights Middle School for a Big Read of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in an effort to boost the reading proficiency of students who had scored below the state standard for reading proficiency. Students and community members read and celebrated the novel with a range of activities including live readings, book discussions, a visit from Harper Lee expert Charles Shields, and a school residency with YANEO theater artists.

Courtesy of Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio (and ace photographer Stacy Goldberg), here are some snaps from Cleveland’s Mockingbird read.

Students at Warrensville Heights Middle School picketed with signs about To Kill A Mockingbird in front of their school, garnering a lot of curiosity and awareness about The Big Read. This effort helped encourage the entire community to become engaged in reading the book.

Students worked with a Young Audiences theater artist to act out scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird at the Cuyahoga County Public Library – Warrensville Heights Branch. Here they are creating a tableau around vocabulary words from the book.

Former Warrensville mayor Marcia Fudge (now a U.S. Representative) and the late U.S. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones read a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird with students from Warrensville Heights Middle School. Congresswoman Tubbs-Jones reflected on her career in the courtroom as a trial lawyer and judge, and how To Kill a Mockingbird was one of her favorite books as it brings the excitement of the courtroom to students through reading. She captivated the audience by reading a few of her favorite passages in her spirited, winning way.

There’s still time to catch a Mockingbird read in Portsmouth, Ohio (Southern Ohio Performing Arts Association), Pensacola, Florida (West Florida Literary Federation), Houston, Texas (Harris County Public Library), Hartford, Connecticut (Hartford Public Library), Whitewater, Wisconsin (Young Auditorium), or Corona, California (Corona Public Library.) Visit The Big Read calendar for details.

May 5, 2009
Washington, DC

Since I missed a chance to wish you a Happy Star Wars day yesterday (May the fourth be with you!),  I wanted to make sure that Cinco de Mayo didn’t go by unremarked. Contrary to popular opinion, it turns out that Cinco de Mayo isn’t Mexican Independence Day, but instead — according to my quick Google search — it commemorates Mexico’s 1862 victory over the French in a war that eventually resulted in France’s (brief) conquering of Mexico in 1864.

The Big Read started the celebration a little early — a couple of years early in fact — with the addition of Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories to The Big Read library. Created especially for The Big Read — the program’s first outing with short fiction — the anthology offers a literary look at life across the border. As editor Jorge F. Hernanez noted in his introduction, “[P] erhaps the short story is the vehicle best suited for rendering snapshot scenes, actual places, words that have been shared by generations or forgotten by time, and above all, flesh-and-blood portraits of Mexicans…whose biographies are eternal, precisely because they’ve been read.”

Read more from our literary neighbors on The Big Read Web site.

May 1, 2009
Washington, DC

Congratulations to Big Read author Marilynne Robinson who was awarded a 2008 L.A. Times Book Prize  for fiction last week. Robinson, whose novel Housekeeping is part of The Big Read library, won for her most recent novel Home. Reporting on Robinson’s interview with Susan Straight at last week’s LA Times Festival of Books, Jacket Copy blogger John Fox described Robinson as “calm and dignified: a persona that matched her prose.”

I eagerly devoured the first chapter of Home when it appeared in The New Yorker, and I bought the hardback a day or two after it was first released. Yet I confess — though maybe I shouldn’t — that the novel remains unread. For me, the near-Biblical cadences of Robinson’s prose and the rhythmic unspooling of her characters interiors demand a heightened quality of attention, sort of like the way you listen intensely to the weighted silence upon entering a church. Robinson’s texts deserves more than a few minutes stolen on the morning commute or in- between weekend errands. I keep waiting for a day that is mine, totally mine, where I need only rise from my bed occasionally for coffee and a snack or two, the rest of the time to sit with the novel’s comforting heft on my lap, making my way into the novel like a meditation. I want all or nothing, to be able to spend all day lost in the novel, or to keep putting it aside until I stumble across the day on which it will be possible.

John Fox ends his blog post about the Robinson-Straight interview with a few sentences that speak to the sense that reading Robinson can be akin to a spiritual pilgrimage. “After questions from the audience, just before the session ended, Straight offhandedly mentioned: ‘’I listened to an interview where you said writing is like prayer.’ Robinson nodded politely, and as the audience exited, those words — a kind of benediction — accompanied us.”

(See the entire Jacket Copy post.)

April 23, 2009
Washington, DC

This Saturday is the official “”home opener” for DC’s Big Read of Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. (Visit The Big Read Web site to take a look at what the Humanities Council of Washington, DC has lined up for this year’s lit lovefest.) On hand at the festivities will be hometown mystery writer George Pelecanos who’s doing the honors as this year’s honorary chair for the District’s Read. Pelecanos gamely offered the following response to “Why read?”

“On the shelf behind my desk, there are perhaps a dozen books that were given to me, over forty years ago, by a woman named Estelle Petrulakis. ‘Mrs. Pet,’ as we called her, was a public school teacher who worked in some of the more impoverished sections of Washington, D.C. She was also a Sunday-school teacher with my mother, Ruby Pelecanos, at our church, St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral. Mrs. Pet understood the value in reading, especially for kids who wanted to go “someplace else” and leave the sameness of their day-to-day. She recognized that I had an active imagination. She also felt that by turning me on to fiction my imagination would be further ignited and I would acquire a lifetime love of not just stories but of language itself. I’m convinced that I am a professional writer and a voracious reader to this day because of Mrs. Pet and other key teachers who made a difference in my life. I read to go to that someplace else.”

– George Pelecanos

April 21, 2009
Washington, DC

Congratulations to Big Read author Louise Erdrich who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel The Plague of Doves. Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, debuts on The Big Read list this fall.

April 20, 2009
Washington, DC

Happy Patriot’s Day Boston, Maine, and — according to Wikipedia — Wisconsin! Celebrate the day, which commemorates the opening battles of the War for Independence in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, by running the 113th annual Boston Marathon. If you’re looking for a less strenuous option, how about reciting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”? Here are a couple of stanzas to get you started:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hand a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country folk to be up and to arm.

April 17, 2009
Washington, DC

Happy Birthday Cynthia Ozick! As a New Yorker, I can’t resist celebrating the happy occasion by sharing this quote by Anita Brookner, from a 1999 review in The Spectator. Though The Shawl takes place in Warsaw and Miami, I think the quote speaks to Ozick’s deft evocations of the surroundings in which her characters plod, pant, carry on so that the cities themselves become characters.

“She is as authentic a voice of New York as was Edith Wharton before her, but Ozick’s New York is an affair of battered suburbs, of cavernous municipal buildings, of ancient Hebrew teachers living above Cuban grocery stores, of public libraries, wily lovers and miraculous if inconvenient apparitions.”

April 17, 2009
Washington, DC

If you value your right to check out a library copy of Fahrenheit 451, or Huck Finn, or Bless Me, Ultima, you owe the late Judith Krug big-time. Krug, who died Saturday, led the fight against censorship for the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom for over forty years. While there, she succeeded in consecrating the last week of every September as Banned Books Week.

I never met her, but Krug’s many battles over our right to read what we please were legend. The best tribute I’ve seen so far came in her hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. At the height of the controversy over Madonna’s book “Sex,” they once quoted Krug as saying, “The book is sleazy trash, but it should be in every medium-sized library in the United States.”

Not just trash, mind you, but “sleazy trash.” Krug was a First-Amendment absolutist with taste. The neverending struggle for freedom of expression always needs new champions. To replace Judith Krug, it will need a country full of them.

April 16, 2009
Washington, DC

As his son Thom tells it, even John Steinbeck had to trick his kids into loving literature!

Looking for tips on getting your kids to enjoy reading? Here’s some advice from avid Big Reader Marie Pyko.

Want more Steinbeck? Join Jackson District Library’s Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath.