Reading between the lanes
The car-driving culture of LA is hindering plans for a simultaneous book-reading initiative. But Duncan Campbell might just have the solution

Duncan Campbell
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
The Guardian

This spring the mayor of Los Angeles, Jim Hahn, is going to suggest that all his citizens curl up with a good book, namely Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

This summer, all Californians are going to be asked by the California Humanities Council to read another fine novel, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

It is a part of a craze sweeping the United States for cities and states to decide to read the same book at the same time.

In many ways it is reminiscent of that craze in the 1980s, which started in Australia, for every city to photograph itself over a 24-hour period and publish the results.

Some of the results were spectacular and it gave many deserving freelance photographers work but eventually the idea ran out of steam.

The book idea was started five years ago in Seattle by Nancy Pearl, the executive director of the Washington Centre for the Book.

The novel chosen then was Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter, and the success of experiment has been noted and imitated.

Last autumn, Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley, asked his citizens to tackle To Kill a Mockingbird, which they did with such gusto in the One Book, One Chicago programme that the paperback version shot up from 250th to 51st place on the Amazon hit parade.

The book was publicised through the public libraries and with the distribution of 40,000 badges saying: "Are you reading Mockingbird?"

Now lots of mayors seemed to have decided that this is a great way for their citizens to have a shared experience, a great way to remind people that there is much fine literature that they may not have read and a great way to stimulate literacy.

One pictures trains, buses and subway cars packed with people all reading the same book and giving each other knowing looks as they turn the page.

The big problem for Los Angeles, however, is that the public transport system is almost non-existent and only 5% of commuters use it, the rest of them climbing into their cars.

So when are we all going to have the shared experience?

Julie Wong, communications director for mayor Hahn, spotted the problem and told the Los Angeles Times: "We may not have trains, but people here spend a lot of time in their cars and could listen to books on tape.

"People want to feel a sense of community, especially in a city like LA which is so spread out."

But doesn't listening to a tape book defeat the point of the exercise? After all, we could have seen François Truffaut's filmed version of Fahrenheit 451 but it's a different kind of experience from turning pages.

The book, in case you haven't read it or seen the film, is about a futuristic fascist state where all books are burned but are bravely kept alive by dissidents learning entire books by heart so that they can live on.

So here is my suggestion. With many actors in LA out of work at the moment for a variety of reasons would it not be possible for the mayor to hire them all to learn Fahrenheit 451 off by heart and position them in public places across LA with a sign making it clear who they were?

We could then give them a lift, sit them in the car and ask them to recite from the book for the course of our journey.

At a time when the US government has just set up the Office of Strategic Influence to spread fiction abroad surely there can be nothing wrong in civic money to be used to spread much more entertaining fiction at home?

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