By the book, communities can grow closer

It has been called the nation’s hottest intellectual trend, a novel way to get even the most diverse communities on the same page at the same time.

The notion of encouraging a whole community to read a single book together was born four years ago in Seattle. As word of its success spread, cities everywhere soon jumped on the idea. In no time, the program was being copied in Minneapolis, Buffalo, N.Y., Philadelphia, Honolulu, Providence, R.I., and Boise, Idaho.

So far, the country’s largest readathon was the one in Chicago, where people so enjoyed reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” en masse last year that the city now plans to hold a “One Book, One Chicago” event twice a year. In New York City, where 100 different languages are spoken among 8 million people, the committee running the program has been at war over what book will best bring everyone together. It’s a deliciously ironic twist on cultural harmony, to be sure, but a clear indication that New Yorkers may be getting back to normal after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Big Apple’s communal reading effort also has irked some of the city’s intellectuals, who assailed it as “groupthink” that treats literature as a civics lesson.

“The New Yorker disdains to be a booster, of his own city or his own culture,” Ann Douglas, a Columbia University professor, told The New York Times recently. “That is for the provinces.”

By “the provinces,” she might have been referring to places such as Bangor, which last week ended its first experiment in transforming the traditionally solitary pursuit of reading into a citywide book discussion group. The city’s librarians and booksellers declared “Bangor Reads,” which ran from Jan. 2 to Feb. 16, a pleasantly surprising success.

“We believe it was a community-builder for us,” said Anne Mundy, the children’s librarian at the Bangor Public Library and a coordinator of the program. “It met our goals of bringing many different kinds of people together to talk and share ideas about important issues. It laid the groundwork for making it an annual event.”

Borders bookstore sold more than 180 copies of “The Killer Angels,” Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel, in just over a month. BookMarc’s store sold at least 70 copies, and there was a waiting list for the library’s 20-plus copies throughout the campaign. The library’s discussion groups, film screenings, lectures and its Civil War re-enactment were well-attended, Mundy said, and lots of people requested the lapel pins that were meant to signify one’s participation in the program.

I was glad to hear it worked. Anything that fosters community spirit is a worthwhile pursuit. But I’ll admit I never fully committed myself to the reading program. Rather than springing for the book, and joining a library discussion group, I took the cheap way out and read a display copy over coffee at Borders each Friday evening. After a couple of reading sessions, however, I’d become interested enough to start looking around for people with whom I might discuss the book’s larger themes. Had I spotted someone wearing a “Bangor Reads” pin, for instance, I might have considered it an invitation to sidle over, introduce myself, and engage my kindred spirit in a little anti-war dialogue. But unlike in Chicago or Seattle, where lapel pins reportedly were much in evidence on trains, buses and in restaurants, I couldn’t find anyone wearing one. If Bangor was reading, as I suspected it was, it was reading too quietly to notice.

“No, I didn’t see lapel pins on the streets, either,” said bookseller Marc Berlin. “Mainers are not like that, though. They’re more private, and not quick to react to trends. But I do think the program was a real success here on a serious level rather than as the popular, trendy kind of public event that has happened in urban areas.”

Which goes to prove, I guess, that there is more than one way for one community to read one book at one time.