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…

June 10, 2008
Minneapolis, MN

He looked like a fourth Pep Boy. He wore a pencil moustache, a crew cut, and owlish black glasses. The cigar, I’m probably making up. And that voice! Brooklyn or the Bronx, whichever one’s thicker. He used it to talk about books the way a great sports-talk host talks about sports: volubly, without repetition, as if nothing else in the world could matter. He was Matthew J. Bruccoli, and he was one of the best friends American literature and The Big Read, and any of his friends, ever had.

I first encountered Matt Bruccoli years before I met him, as the author of the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Leave it to Matt, with his encyclopedic, even Googolic knowledge of Fitzgerald’s every word, to pick out from that treasurehouse the perfect, emblematic, unforgettable title.

Matthew Bruccoli. Photo courtesy of the University of South Carolina.

Meeting him had to wait until years later, not long after I arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle to become program director of The Big Read. Dan in audio was putting together one of our first Big Read CDs, about The Great Gatsby, and I just knew we had to get Bruccoli. It wasn’t easy. Arch-bibliophile that he is, Matt had taken to email like a duck to buckshot. Somehow, though, through a forest of intermediaries, I got through to him and, with a nervousness that looks absurd in retrospect, finally winkled him out of South Carolina and into the Big Read office.

My first impression was that he had walked up all seven flights. Bruccoli came in breathless, perspiring in suit and tie, carrying a plump satchel. After a few minutes of careening conversation that was like a table of contents for every conversation we would ever have, Dan ushered him into the audio booth, a notorious sweatbox.

In impassioned but scholarly, extemporaneous yet diagrammable paragraphs — not just on Fitzgerald, but on Hemingway and Hammett besides — Prof. Bruccoli held us spellbound for an hour easy, never once loosening his foulard, while all around him swigged water by the nalgene.

“Strivers!”, he cried, nailing for legions of Big Read listeners in one emphatically flung word the generation of ambitious dreamers for whom Gatsby stood in. Around the office even now, at the mention of Matt’s name, it’s a contest between Dan and me to see who can pronounce it with a more faithful New York honk. “Strivers!” The merest hint of an audible “r” is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Bruccoli was a striver too. Like the teenager in the stacks that Salinger and Updike used to fantasize about, Bruccoli was a bookish kid from an unbookish household. One day he wandered sweatily from a stickball game into a candystore, recognized Fitzgerald’s name on a paperback spinner from a radio play the week before, picked up Gatsby, and he was off to the races. If young Matt was anywhere near as good at stickball as he was at reading, the loss to American sport was incalculable.

Sixty years later, in the home he and Arlyn finally made in Columbia, S.C., he was still that same book-drunk Katzenjammer Kid, only all grown up, and living in the best candystore any kid with a sweet tooth for books ever had. People natter on a lot about book-filled houses, and they go on a lot about light-filled houses, too. Thanks probably more to Arlyn, their house is the only one I’ve ever visited that was both.

I’m sorry I’ll never see Matt lunging across his study to show me yet another association copy he’d picked up for a song. I’m sorry we’ll never put on the screenwriters conference we brainstormed about for the last year. And, maybe more than anything, I’m sorry for all the Big Read cities full of teenagers he won’t get to visit now, and contaminate with his enthusiasm for Fitzgerald in particular and life in general.

It wasn’t easy, but I had to smile when I saw in his local paper’s obituary that Matt had died “at his Heathwood Circle home.” That only made sense. Matt could never have died in a hospital room. Not enough books in it.

If I forced myself to sum up in a word this man so congenitally besotted with the American language, that word would be “bookman.” Matt Bruccoli was a bookman the way old wharf rats talk about “watermen,” men who, whether navigating the sea, fishing it or just looking out longingly at it, are unimaginable away from the their chosen element. Matt Bruccoli’s element was books, and I can’t even write about him without using the technology he so disdained to set this remembrance of him in the only possible font for it: Bookman Old Style.

“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 21, 2007
Washington, DC

Are all books created equal? Or are some books more equal than others? These are the questions we stumbled into last week when I made a careless suggestion: Why not mount “quality challenges” to those books in local libraries that offend standards, not of decency, but of quality?

When last we left our hero, which is to say me, I was getting beaten about the head and shoulders for thus implying that some books might be better than others. Swinishly, I dragooned one of the best playwrights in the English language into my corner. Tom Stoppard, it so happens, has a monologue in The Real Thing about great writing where he allows as how, “It’s better because it’s better.”

In the opposite corner, in the Prince-purple trunks, weighing in at 97 pounds sopping wet, is Nick Hornby — the author of High Fidelity and Songbook, of which I once wrote, “Why doesn’t anybody write about books with the same personal, visceral immediacy that Hornby brings to writing about songs?”

Maybe somebody at Believer noticed, because next thing I knew, Hornby himself was writing in that fine magazine about books with the same personal, visceral, etc. Here follows the first of two grafs that my colleague David forwarded me, from Hornby’s own thinking about good books and bad (from The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Viking/Penguin):

“And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book — The Da Vinci Code, maybe - because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And, anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don’t mean we should all be reading chick-lit or thrillers (although, if that’s what you want to read, that’s fine by me, because here’s something else no one will ever tell you: if you don’t read the classic or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do). I simply mean, that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find that you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.”

There’s another graf after this which I’ll probably cite in a few days, but you get the idea. Bad books are good, and not just as a gateway drug to better books, but also in themselves, as a gateway into other minds, other lives, other horizons beyond our own. I agree with Hornby completely — maybe even more completely than I agree with Stoppard.

And maybe this is one definition of good writing: It convinces you, even if it contradicts what convinced you just a minute ago. The usual literary defense of such logical absurdity falls to Walt Whitman, who’ll definitely belong near the front of the line when The Big Read gets around to poetry next year. But I think I prefer F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subject, as quoted by John LeCarre in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Nowhere can I find where exactly Fitzgerald said this — any answers out there? — but it certainly sounds like the author of Big Read favorite The Great Gatsby. Heaven knows nobody else ever has. What’s your definition of good writing? More on this soon, since how can you hold two opposing ideas in mind without striking them together to watch the sparks?

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….