Cities across U.S. push novel idea to boost reading

CHICAGO – Seattle did it first. Los Angeles is doing it next. But this city of ethnic neighborhoods and exaggerated blue-collar grit – former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka likened the town and the team to “a bunch of guys named Grabowski” – is where the United States’ hottest intellectual trend really took off.

Mayor Richard M. Daley last fall asked every resident in this city of 3 million to read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The response to One Book, One Chicago was electric.

The novel about a white lawyer who defends a black man accused of rape in a Southern town in the 1930s was checked out of public libraries more than 6,500 times in seven weeks. The paperback made its way up from 250th to 51st place on Amazon.com’s national sales list. The Chicago Bar Association held a mock trial of the courtroom drama depicted in the novel, in costume. The Chicago Public Library staged a marathon weekend screening of the movie version, starring Gregory Peck. And Daley, a popular mayor who is fond of planting flower beds and commissioning art to beautify the city, asked library officials to pick out a spring book. (They did, Elie Wiesel’s “Night.”)

Ever since, communities across the country have embraced the idea of reading a book together.

“There’s definitely been a buzz since Chicago did ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,'” said Jim Quay, executive director of the California Humanities Council.

Inspired by Chicago’s example, the council will ask Californians this summer to read John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” At more than 600 pages, Steinbeck’s classic is hardly a typical beach book. Still, California officials seem confident the Joad family’s story of migrating from Oklahoma will appeal. “It’s a great read,” Quay said.

As for Los Angeles, Mayor James K. Hahn plans to ask residents this spring to read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

In Bangor, Maine, the public library is sponsoring a program for the community to read Michael Shaara’s Civil War novel “The Killer Angels,” which is about the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.

In an age of multimedia menus, with 24-hour cable TV and movies on demand, it might seem anachronistic that the low-tech book is occasioning this sudden civic interest. But some believe the surge of popularity for communal reading – not just by cities but also by book clubs and at bookstore events – is a direct response to the essential loneliness of modern life, an antidote to the “bowling alone” syndrome coined by Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam to describe the recent downturn in civic participation.

“You can go through an entire day without ever interacting with another human being on anything except the superficial,” said Nancy Pearl, executive director of the Washington Center for the Book that sparked the city-reads-a-book movement in Seattle in 1996. “There’s a thirst for conversation. People want to talk to people about important issues.”

While Seattle sponsored the first citywide reading (Russell Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter”), Pearl acknowledges that Chicago put the trend on the map. So as the phenomenon sparks interest around the world (Hong Kong and Trinidad and Tobago have requested information about Seattle’s program), it may not be simple to duplicate Chicago’s success.

Despite its image as an industrial town of stockyards and beefy politicians, Chicago has long had an affinity for the written word.

Oprah Winfrey lives here, and any book named as an Oprah’s Book Club choice can add millions of dollars to its sales. The American Library Association, the largest and oldest such trade group in the world, has its headquarters here. And the national craze called Poetry Slam, a cross between a reading and a pro wrestling match, got its start here.

Chicago has produced its share of famous authors – Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Gwendolyn Brooks. It especially treasures writers with a fierce bond to the common man, such as Studs Terkel and Mike Royko. It also delights in readers who defy expectations – the colorful Bill Veeck, onetime owner of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, who once let a midget pinch hit in the major leagues and who loved a good book; Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, who was such a passionate reader that the city’s main public library was named in his honor; and Phil Jackson, who as coach of the Chicago Bulls gave each player a book to read every year.

“If you can hang with gas station attendants and university professors, that’s admired,” said Miles Harvey, a Chicago writer.

Once the nation’s second-largest city (it’s now at third, behind New York and Los Angeles), Chicago has long suffered from a “second city complex,” and Harvey thinks that accounts for its emphasis on self-learning.

“There’s more pride in it here,” said Harvey, whose acclaimed “Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime,” was researched in the Newberry Library here, which boasts an impressive map collection. “People still pride themselves on being regular Joes. They are not seething in anti-intellectualism. You might go into a bar and talk books with someone who doesn’t look like they read.”

Then too, there’s the city’s phone book of ethnic names. Chicago is home to the largest number of Polish descendants outside of Warsaw. There is a sizable and growing Latino population.

The black and Jewish communities are prominent. For many Chicagoans, books are a connection to home, to the great authors of Ireland or Russia, to the literary tradition in Poland or Mexico. As a result, the Chicago Public Library buys books in 100 languages.

Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey, widely credited with the success of the One Book, One Chicago program, made sure that the selected books would attract not only the city’s many ethnic communities (the library bought copies in English, Spanish and Polish), but its teen-agers as well.

She and other library officials envisioned “a nice little program (in which) we got strangers talking to strangers on trains and in coffee shops.”

But Daley had grander ambitions. He marshaled the resources of the entire municipal government to ensure the widest possible participation, part of his wider effort to draw the city’s middle class back from the suburbs.

The city reached out to corporate sponsors. Local grocery chain Jewel-Osco teamed with regional corporate powerhouse Procter & Gamble and Borders to offer a $5 rebate on books at Borders for a purchase of three P&G products.