Logan Jenkins

Can We Uncover a Book That Will Bind This Burg?

March 18, 2002

This is a short story that begins in Seattle four years ago with the selection of Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" as a book to bind the city together in a communal reading.

Though Nancy Pearl, director of the Seattle library's Washington Center for the Book, started what's now an annual event, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley produced the blockbuster.

Last fall, Daley jawboned his city into reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" at the same time.

On Amazon.com, the sales of Harper Lee's masterpiece shotgunned from 260th to 51st place. The novel about a Southern white lawyer defending a black man accused of rape in the '30s was checked out of Chicago's public libraries an estimated 6,500 times in seven weeks. The movie based on the book showed over and over at the Chicago Public Library. The local bar (the attorneys, not the Billy Goat Tavern) held a mock trial. The city of Chicago issues 40,000 pins that read "Are you reading Mockingbird?" Libraries hosted forums. Corporations offered rebates at Borders. Starbucks served free coffee and goodies to those in book groups. The city of broad shoulders, which carried the likes of Carl Sandburg, Mike Royko, Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel, hunched over and read in unison.

Word of Daley's triumph blew out of town like an Oprah-approved best-seller. Eighteen states, including California, have assigned books to their huddling masses. New York signed up (predictably perhaps, it's having a battle over the choice of what to read). Recently, Mayor James Hahn announced he'll ask Los Angelenos to burn through Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."

The Joads will take to the road this fall when the California Humanities Council helps 180 libraries pay for developing programs around John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. (Steinbeck was born 100 years ago this year.) In October, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park will screen the 1940 movie. We may not start eating fried dough as a delicacy, but California's cruelty toward the Dust Bowl refugees on Route 66 should remind us of the immigrants crossing the desert and heading up Interstate 5. California's myth of migration writ larger than life.

I called San Diego Mayor Dick Murphy's office to see what he made of this great notion, which has been called One Book, One City. I was disappointed, but not sorely so, in Murphy's dull response, passed on through an aide.

He hadn't heard about the program, but "if (the mayor) were going to do it, he would rather encourage parents to read to their children," she said.

Well, that drip of syrup should please literacy councils, but it's hardly the civic book club that's fashionable to the north.

Which leads me to this question: Could we pull it off here? Do we have the literary soul?

This year Murphy must push through a financing plan for a main library in the shadow of the ballpark. Do we really deserve this high-design monument to the written word? Chicago and Seattle have shown at least one way to prove the point.

The other day, I pulled a few ardent book lovers, asking them what they would like to see San Diegans talking about. Lynn Whitehouse, a San Diego librarian, offered "Ramona" by Helen Hunt Jackson. A historical choice. Charles Best, a local historian, came up with "The African Queen" by CS Forester. It reflects our regions interest in water sports and gardens, he said mysteriously. (And the movie is first-rate.) Michael Davidson, a poet and professor at UC San Diego, suggested young writers working on the racial edge. "Caucasia" by Danzy Senna, for example.

Maybe it's asking too much of a busy mayor to pick up a worthy book and pitch it, as Daley did.

But I wonder: Is it asking too much of us?

Logan Jenkins can be reached at (760) 752-6739 or by email at logan.jenkins@uniontribune.com