How Community Reading Programs Are Changing How We Read

            On the last day of the Baltimore Book Festival, students from Baltimore’s KIPP School filed into the handsome looking offices of Maryland Humanities Council. They were there to meet James McBride, author of Song Yet Sung, the One Maryland One Book selection for 2009. In an hour, Katherine O’Malley would introduce him to a much larger crowd, marking the start of his author tour. But for now his attention was on these fourteen year olds who didn’t immediately recognize him.  McBride, a thin, bespectacled man who wears a flat cap, sports jacket and Vans sneakers has the quiet manner of professor mixed with the cool of a jazz musician. There was a long, awkward silence in the room until a teacher asked the first question. Why did he write his books?  McBride reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash, and flipped it to his ear.

              Everyone laughed. But after the laughs subsided, he leaned in and began to tell the students about his mother, his best selling book The Color of Water, and how writing for him has been something of an act of faith.  He was eager to lay it on the line with these kids about such topics as drugs, pregnancy, and the perils of poverty. And when he held up his pen and told the students that he made his living with his instrument the same way others made it with a shovel, it was clear that writing and reading for James McBride has always been an act of survival.        

            “Look, we are no longer a literate society.  We talk in sound bites.  But if you stop watching television between now and the end of high school and read a newspaper everyday, I all but guarantee you will get a scholarship to college.” 

            It is these no nonsense insights into society, more than anything, that will activate the crowds at the book festival. They have come to hear from the author the meaning of his strange book about a runaway slave with the power to dream of a terrible future where “kids run from books like poison.”  It is a future they fear and are fighting everyday.  But if reading was dead on that late September morning with a crowd of maybe seventy people, young and old, no one was acknowledging it.  For the past year, all across the state, book clubs, teachers, and students have been reading Song Yet Sung. Many more will read it now that the official kick-off has begun. Seeing the author come to Baltimore gives one the sense a small victory had been won in the fight for reading. 

            By all accounts, since the late 1970’s, community reading programs like One Mary, One Book have been doing just that, fighting the battle for reading. Moreover, the participants and organizers of such programs are part of change in the way in which we typically understand literature as a transformative art. For among the many effects these programs have, not least of which is getting people together to talk about books and their community, they are also challenging the notion of that venerable and cultivated habit which recalls book lined studies, fireplaces, and lecture halls. And it may just be that the future of reading will not have anything to do with the Kindle, the crisis in publishing, or the Internet.  It may be that the future of reading has more to do with your next door neighbor, the one you can barely say “hi” to, let alone engage him in a discussion about race relations in the 1850’s.

            Reading has long been seen as an enlightened way to spend your leisure time. It was Plutarch who observed that while both Caius Brutus and his father Junius both had employed violence to preserve the republic, it was the son who was “softened by the learning and study of philosophy.” And, in the nineteenth century, when the middle class of England stopped going to church, a fearful prospect for the ruling class, the nationalization of English literature arose to soften the public against revolution.         

            These days, however, the “softening” of the public character has somehow come to mean something altogether different, conjuring images of the expanded waistline and the doldrums of the couch potato.  That reading is on the decline is now a household truth. The prime suspect is a familiar culprit, technology.  It started with the move from the scroll to codex. Today, it is video games and the internet which have caused some to despair.

            But it wasn’t until 2004 that the suspicions were confirmed when the National Endowment for the Arts study Reading At Risk was published. The study suggested that less than fifty percent of adults were engaged in what they called “literary reading” and that the trend over the past twenty years was dropping precipitously. Suddenly, there were numbers and charts to confirm what every one of us knew. Many considered that report to be the decisive proclamation.  Steve Jobs at the 2008 Macworld Expo, famously dismissed the relevance of Amazon’s Kindle, saying “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” Even Philip Roth described Literature as “one of the great lost human causes.”  And, when the NEA published a second study, four years later, entitled “Reading on the Rise” the news did not travel as fast.  Even though, the central thesis of the report suggested that the trend had reversed due in no small part to the NEA’s own program “The Big Read” and the raw phenomena of Twilight, Harry Potter, and Oprah’s Book Club, it did little to change the growing sense that the book was dead.  Everyone loves an apocalypse. 

            Of course, reading wasn’t dead, or at least not in any absolute way.  In that second NEA study on reading, the inclusion of “online reading” was surely a contributing factor to the improved picture. More books were being published.  The study itself, if it could point to anything definitive, was that reading is a complex cultural behavior affected by forces much larger than the invention of Nintendo.

            How complex? The impact of seeming unrelated phenomena may surprise you.  For example, consider Daniel J. Boorstin’s take.  Boorstin was a historian and Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987 and founder of the Center for the Book.  At a dinner in 1982, he pointed out that the problem of reading has largely been a problem of transportation.  Books, he argued, were forbidden by the Postmaster Return J. Meigs in 1814 because “the mail were … over- crowded with novels and the lighter kind of books for amusement.”  It wasn’t until 1851 that books were admitted with special postage rates. No surprise then that in 1852 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold, mainly through the postal system. “The history of the mails and the growth of reading in the United States, then, is largely a drama of our bias for speedy useful information.”    Who would have guessed that the drama for speedy information would have put even the efficacy of the post office perilously into question?

             Boorstin’s point, however, was that we can’t know what people are reading. It is too complex to track with our most modern bias, statistics.  But, if one were going to point to numbers, he highlighted the fact that in 1950 there were eleven thousand titles published and in 1982 there were forty thousand titles published which suggested, at least on the outset, that there was a greater demand for books.  That number still impresses.  Some twenty seven years later, Bowker reported that there was a 3.2% decline in titles published.  The total number for 2008?  275,232 titles published and paired by a 132% increase of “on demand” publishing.  There may be less people reading, but clearly those that read are reading many more books.

            The confusion, says Dr. Danielle Fuller of the University of Birmingham, lies in our overemphasis on more recent history. She believes that this apocalyptic talk about the end of culture and the end of reading is just “rubbish.” Fuller, who has just recently concluded a four year study of mass reading events in North America and who is now at work on a book about her findings, believes that reading has a much more vibrant life than some elite groups would have us believe.  Simply put:  reading isn’t dying, it’s changing.  

            There are currently more than five hundred programs which model themselves after One City, One Book and in countries like Singapore, Australia, Netherlands, and Belgium. What was once the activity of private drawing rooms and libraries, reading has moved outside into a more public sphere. 

            “Reading has been a shared experience more than it has been private” says Fuller.  “Even when people started reading privately, there were still many examples of shared reading because it was so long until mass literacy came about.”  People have always read aloud, have read to each other, or while at work.  The picture of the reading life in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries is just one iteration in the history of the book. “Even when you do it on your own, you do it in a social space.”  

            Admittedly, this last point confused me.  But when I considered the books that I have in my “library” and the authors with whom I choose to spend time and those choose to rebuff, it becomes clear that the reasons why we read and our expectations about its effect and value are very much tied to sense of who we think we are and to which community we belong, real or imagined.  So when Daniel Boorstin urged Jimmy Carter to pass public law 95-129 in 1977 which started the Center for the Book, and when Nancy Pearl began her landmark program “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” in 1998, which many people consider the modern genesis of the One City One Book model of community reading, it was not simply the nations librarians eagerness to share their own book lust. The social space of reading itself was being transformed. The titles selected by Pearl and her “Rule of 50”, just like a presidential decree, take what was once a private urge and make it public.    

            And yet, even this easy public/private divide doesn’t quite explain the complex social act of reading.  It is only part of the story.  Consider the following paradox:  One of the assumptions Dr. Fuller and research partners had when they first surveyed mass reading events throughout North America and the United Kingdom was that these groups would be utilizing technology to share the reading experience among larger groups.  It would seem inevitable that a public movement should use the most efficient ways to communicate.  Yet, even as reading itself moved into a more notably public sphere, it abandoned these more innovative tools for communication.  They were, well, more “old fashioned.”  So, when you consider that many One City One Book programs privileged the local and regional over the national, often choosing books that speak to issues in the surrounding community, the notion that these are simply “public” reading groups breaks down.  The world may be becoming more interconnected, more global, but as readers we are still holding on to that more basic unit of governance, the tribe.

            Naturally, one would expect those with the greatest investment in the traditional notions of reading to express disdain for such a movement.  Indeed, there have been some notable dissenters. Twenty years earlier, Daniel Boorstin himself, wrote “I am suspicious of all mass medicines for national malaise and national purposelessness.  The bigger the committee, the more “representative” its membership, the more collaborative its work, the less chance that it will do more than ease of disguise our symptoms.  The problem of “national purpose” is largely an illusion—although one of the most popular illusions of our time.” Certainly, one could imagine he might extend this criticism to the mass reading programs today even if his was an impulse to cultivate such programs. 

             More recently, however, when New York City was debating which book to read in 2002, Harold Bloom was quoted in a New York Times Article entitled “Want a Fight?  Pick One Book for al New Yorkers” as saying “'I don't like these mass reading bees.  It is rather like the idea that we are all going to pop out and eat Chicken McNuggets or something else horrid at once.”  Bloom, who in his 1996 survey “The Western Canon” lamented the scarcity of deep readers, considered the initiative to read one book was nothing more than the urge for political correctness. 

            “There is a lot of social and cultural investment, particularly by elite groups, in maintaining the reading of “good” books,” says Dr. Fuller.  “We’re super invested in the reading the Book, in the reading of Literature.  But reading as an identity is changing.”  Perhaps, then, those who proclaim the end of culture, may only be lamenting the shift of what was once an elite activity, into one with more popular formations.   

            Phoebe Stein Davis, director of the Maryland Humanities Council and relation of Gertrude Stein, agrees with this argument.  She accepts that people might be suspicious of community reading programs.  But, in her view, it basically it comes down to a plain fact: more reading is always better.  Her own interests in Health and Literature—a study of the narratives of healing, sickness, and the dialogue in between—supposes a sense that literary culture is inherently a community activity, whether it be in the small discussion groups or the televised community of Oprah’s Book Club.  In the end, these kinds of programs are not about mastering the text, but rather about making a personal connection between the issues in a book and the issues in their lives. 

            “Look,” she says, “If you are reading a shared text, that is the place to come together to talk about something as potentially divisive as race, for example, it is definitely an advantage.  People have a chance to see dance or theater, but there may not be the chance for those people to talk about it afterwards.”

            Andrea Lewis, the coordinator of One Maryland One Book, has all the gifts god gave to librarians:  Patience, a quiet manner, generous grin, and a facility for polite innuendo. It doesn’t take long for Andrea to wade through the ten million Post-it notes and papers piled on her desk to find what she wants.  (She has a system)  If this job stresses her out, it’s hard to tell. Navigating the web of public and private institutions which make her program possible was her specialty. 

            The OMOB started last year when Andrea, Jean Wortman, program manger for the Council and liaison for the Center for the Book, and Irene Padilla, Assistant State Superintendent for Libraries organized the eventual 2008 selection, Ron Suskind’s Hope in the Unseen.   It began primarily with the two venues which the Humanities Council had access to, the state’s libraries and schools.  Bank of America donated three thousand books to be distributed to city students. The program was a huge success, but they still had the urge to make it bigger, to reach more people.

            By the time I arrived in January, the last of the books were being sent out, four months from the official kick-off and already they were gearing up for 2009. By February the next book was already being discussed and I was just in time to watch a whole year’s worth of planning go into the 2009 selection. Like a lot of One City One Book programs, Maryland’s initiative demonstrates many of the qualities as other reading groups do. Books are chosen by a selection committee of twelve to fifteen. Members serve for a specific term limit, in this case, two years. They begin with a hundred titles in November.  By December, they bring that number down to ten and then to three in January. The preference for inclusively necessarily means they are not going to choose books that are experimental. They look for books that are appropriate for high school and adults.  Race and Multiculturalism just so happened to be the theme because the Humanities Council runs a two year special initiative that serves as a subject or issue to tie together all the council’s programs. But one would not expect the program to pick a book that is without some socio-political significance.  Also, cost is an issue.  As Craig Burke of Riverhead Books points out, there is no marketing strategy for publishers to become a member of these programs.  “Most community reading programs like to select books that are available in paperback, so the program organizers have usually had at least a year to read potential selections in hardcover.” 

            It is not easy to note the obstacles from year to year, but most people are eager to participate.  “Sometimes people think that if they sign up with us this it’s going to be prescriptive. Sometimes the thought is I am going to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get my free books. Our feeling is that the people who are in the local community are the best ones to know what type of program has the most appeal for that community.  All we ask for in exchange is that you use our logo and give us feedback.”

            Feedback is the one illusive prize about such programs.  Certainly there are some measures. Barnes & Noble partners with the program and can certainly account for books sold. By the end of the program last October, there were two hundred and eighty holds at the Baltimore county library. But, “a book read is not consumed” wrote Daniel Boorstin and once again the bias of statistics doesn’t hold when it comes to reading culture. “So many people hear about this program,” says Andrea. “But there is no way for us to ever really know how many people pick up the book and read it because we selected it for One Maryland One Book.”

            I have to admit, by the time the book was officially launched in September, I too wanted this feedback.  A community reading program makes talking about a book addictive.  I say this, by the way, as a convert. I understand that it is hard for those who read avidly not to be skeptical of a book chosen by committee. Considering the many criteria by which a book is chosen, sensible as they may seem, it somehow goes against the grain for some readers. While the idea that more reading is always better is something most people will agree on. The spirit in which it is sometimes said could certainly mask another notion which is to say, talented readers do not need a program to get them to discuss the important matters on which books are written.  So it was that when I had to read McBride’s Song Yet Sung, I was suspicious.  Not that I knew anything about James McBride or the book. There was a part of me that believed that the very selection of such a book by large reading initiatives somehow precluded the possibility that it was good literature.

            The job I was given was to comb every detail out of the book to create a reading guide which others could use. For a High School English teacher, this was my specialty. But as I attacked the book, it occurred to me that I was becoming something of a public reader.  And with that notion came a number of serious issues.  For one thing, I was not from Maryland. Reading a book that is explicitly about the Eastern Shore might question the legitimacy my understanding of the text.   Another aspect of the book was that that it was a text about race and Maryland’s role in the legacy of slavery. Again, this made me something of an outsider to some of the essential elements of this book.  Ultimately, I could not sympathize with many residents of the Eastern shore who had complained that the book had falsely represented Dorchester County. And my hesitancy to draw readers attention to the Liz Spocott’s dreams in my questioning was directly related to the fact that I was not comfortable with the judgments of contemporary African American culture made by McBride. Clearly, the issues of community were at work in my reading of the text.

            Yet, a turning point in my understanding of the text was when I made a trip to the Maryland Historical Society.  I was looking for maps of the eastern shore from the late 1800’s and spent the better part of my day in the Historical Society’s reading room pouring over artifacts of a bygone era.  I made a list of all the places that were mentioned in the text and spent the better part of a day trying to locate them on maps that were sometimes four or five feet wide. I thought I was a poor researcher until I realized that I was reading a book of fiction.  Still, what had at first been a reluctant nibble at Song Yet Sung became an obsessive feast of imagination. For a person who has always considered himself an elite reader, the experience of reading in this way was extremely satisfying.  Not only was I communing with of work of art, but I was also coming to understand the culture in which I was working and living. 

            By the time the reader’s guide was completed, I had read the book numerous times, I had signed up for free copies to teach the book with my colleagues at school, and had finally bridged what were once mutually exclusive worlds, the reading life and the community life.  Now all that lacked was the arrival of the author, the one who is in some ways the locus of the intersection between the public and the private, or what Emerson would call “representative.”

            More than ever, the author has been thrust onto the stage at equal footing with the text.  Notions such as the “Death of the Author” are by current estimations, merely an academic exercise.  The realities of modern publishing have put greater demands on the author’s time and his ability to speak for his book.  Many large reading initiatives choose their book not only for accessibility of the subject matter, but for the degree with which the author will interact with the audience.  The Jonathan Franzen’s of this world, while noble for their refusal to participate in the public spectacle of literature, certainly will never be part of mass reading movements.  And even though an author like James McBride may not necessarily be comfortable with such a role, it is one that he must accept.

             If anything, McBride sees himself as a storyteller.  When asked a few weeks before the festival if he considers the requirements of such programs, especially in light of the fact that two of his books have been popular picks with community reading programs, he said “If I did that, I’d never be able to write another book. The only way you can spend years producing 300-odd pages and give it muscle and girth is if you have a burning desire to tell that story.”  And he was quick to put his own ability to discern the state of society in perspective.  “I’m the father of a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old. In their opinion, most of the time, about 95 percent of the time, I’m an absolute idiot.”

            However, this is not the kind of humility that is expected of authors.  Rather, the assumptions about writing, the process and the product, are very much tied to a deeper understanding of society. Popular readership wants their authors to know something about the conditions of the world.  The associations of reading with knowledge and understanding require the author of books to be an authority on the subject matter.   For a book like Song Yet Sung which is a work of fiction, the complaints about misrepresentation only point to larger pressures that are put upon the artist.  He has to be right.  And when he is wrong, there is suspicion.  To consider this in light of Nabokov’s famous quip “Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth” is to realize how divergent these two conceptions of literature are.   Much to McBride’s credit, this seems to be a point he is keen on making.  “Look I’m a journalist which is something like a cheap scholar.  We know a little bit about a lot of things.  But we don’t have a deep understanding about a particular topic.”  Song Yet Sung is purposefully ambiguous about these issues of race and culpability.  And in this way, McBride shields himself from obvious attacks.  “Literature is about ambiguity,” he says.   

            Though the tenets of community reading programs may be challenging a hundred and fifty years of literary habit, it is clear that this is the new face of reading.  Nothing epitomized this more when a young student of the KIPP school, too shy to speak during the private meeting with McBride, took the microphone in front of the larger crowd at the Book festival and asked the million dollar question: would McBride want his other books to be made into movies as the Miracle of St. Anna had a few years earlier by Spike Lee.  McBride was quick to give the girl credit for her love of films.  At her age, he said, it was a good way to get into a book.  He drew knowledgeable distinctions between To Kill a Mocking Bird and the film version directed by Robert Mulligan.  But, he added, reading is more satisfying experience and he would never want his first book to be turned into a movie.  It is too deep, too complex and in some ways, more honest. “If I had once piece of advice: learn to love reading.”