TRY STEINBECK THIS SUMMER

SUE GILMORE, TIMES BOOK EDITOR

May 12, 2002

WE'RE DEEP INTO the tender clutches of May by now, which means it's high time for us to be thinking about passing along our recommendations for your beach and poolside summer reading. And Times columnists Lynn Carey and Myles Knapp will be doing just that on May 26, in our Sunday A&E section.

Meanwhile, however, the folks at the California Council for the Humanities have beaten us to the punch. They are determined to get you and every other Californian reading or rereading John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" this summer in time for a marathon series of discussions and activities launching in October at 180 libraries across the state.

We probably do not need to belabor the much-publicized fact that 2002 is the centennial year of the birth of California's most famous author. That, of course, makes "Grapes" ripe picking for what amounts to one big happy book club on growth hormones.

But council executive director Jim Quay says this initiative is more ambitious than the various "one-city, one-book" programs across the country that had, for instance, Chicagoans reading Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" last summer and Elie Wiesel's autobiographical novel of the Holocaust, "Night," this spring. (Seattleites, by the same token, were asked to read Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" in 1998, and their response generated a 10,000-volume surge in sales, according to the city's booksellers.)

Quay, whose state agency is affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities, notes that the selection of "Grapes" is also thematically a perfect choice for California, which has never in its history had less than a 50 percent population of immigrants. "People come to California from many places and for many reasons, so the story of migration is one story Californians share," he said. "We want to give Californians from every walk of life a chance to read and discuss the book together, a chance to reflect on their own family's move to California, the dreams and disappointments shared by immigrants then and now, a chance to consider the place of their own story in the story of California."

The council's statewide reading program is cosponsored by the California Center for the Book and has received funding from the California State Library. Other backing organizations include the Center for Steinbeck Studies, the California Federation of Teachers, and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, among many others.

Some noted celebrities, too, have endorsed the project, including Russell Banks, Dennis Hopper, authors Barry Lopez and Anchee Min, Rob Reiner, Orville Schell, Maria Shriver and former U.S. poet laureate and UC Berkeley professor Robert Hass.

And in recognition of the fact that nearly one-third of all Californians today are of Hispanic or Latino descent, Steinbeck publisher Penguin Putnam plans to release a Spanish-language edition of "Grapes of Wrath." It should be on bookracks in early July.

Those of you who are already well-versed in the story of the Joad family's trek from the Dust Bowl to the Golden State might want to take a peek at the plans now coalescing for the "California Stories: Reading 'The Grapes of Wrath'" project in October. Check out the council's Web site at www.calhum.org.

Bookends appears every other Sunday. Sue Gilmore is the Times book editor. Reach her at 925-977-8482 or sgilmore@cctimes.com.