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October 30, 2002Reading 'to bring city together'Program beginning Friday aims to get residents to read same bookBy MIKE NORTONRecord-Eagle staff writer TRAVERSE CITY - What if everybody in Traverse City read the same book, at the same time? Victoria Sutherland wants to find out. "I'm hoping that if whole families read the same book and talk about it at dinnertime, and hear about it from their friends, maybe they'll all go to the bookstore or the library on Sunday afternoons instead of flipping on the television set," she said. She's managed to persuade a lot of other individuals, businesses and community groups to give the idea a try. On Friday, they'll be launching an effort called "Traverse City Reads" to persuade as many people as possible, in the city and the surrounding region, to read a single book - Leif Enger's award-winning novel "Peace Like a River" - in what they're hoping will become an annual event. During the months of November and December, area bookstores and libraries will have hundreds of extra copies of Enger's novel on hand, along with pins that will help readers identify each other. Teachers in area junior and senior high reading programs will be adding "Peace Like a River" to their reading and discussion lists, while special needs readers will be able to reserve audio and large-print editions of the book at the Traverse Area District Library. In January, the second phase of the effort will begin, as dozens of discussion groups, student workshops and other events - including a theatrical presentation at the Old Town Playhouse and a Jan. 24-26 visit from the author - swing into play. The central idea, said Sutherland, is "to bring the city together around shared themes and contemplative ideas" and "provoke thoughtful dialogue between individuals who might otherwise never meet or talk." Scores of cities and towns across the country - in some cases, even entire states - have begun holding community reading programs in the past few years. The movement was started in 1998 by a Seattle librarian named Nancy Pearl, and has spread to Chicago, Buffalo, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Milwaukee and Palm Beach and dozens of other communities. Parents and children discussing Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Waitresses and customers debating plot and character in Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" at the coffee shop. Sutherland is the publisher of ForeWord magazine, a trade journal that provides reviews of books from small independent publishing houses. But she's also on the literacy committee for Traverse City's chapter of Zonta International, and her moment of awakening came when she was helping coordinate a weekly story hour for young children at the Women's Resource Center. "What I saw wasn't the children as much as their mothers," she said. "They were leaning over the stairwell, listening to those stories, and they were so hungry. I realized that they wanted to hear the stories, too, but reading had simply never been a big part of their lives." Zonta organized a book club for the moms, modeled along the lines of the program started by talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey. When Sutherland read about the spreading "community read" movement, she contacted Richard Schneider, manager of the Traverse Area District Library. As it happened, he and other library officials had been thinking along exactly the same lines, and they quickly organized a plan for the winter of 2002-2003. The group chose "Peace Like a River" for several reasons. It's a first novel by an author whose lyrical gifts have been praised by critics who usually have no enthusiasm for midwestern themes. (Andrew Roe of the San Francisco Chronicle said it "serves as a reminder of why we read fiction to begin with.") And it deals with "big questions" like family love and religious faith, and deals with them respectfully and thoughtfully. Narrated by an 11-year-old asthmatic named Reuben Land, "Peace Like a River" is set in rural Minnesota and the badlands of North Dakota. It's about Reuben's father, a high school janitor who has been given the gift of performing miracles, his poetry-writing sister Swede, and his older brother Davy, who becomes an outlaw after shooting two thugs who had broken into the Land home. As Reuben and his family set out to find and retrieve this lost son, events move toward a moment of final, sad redemption. Traverse City Reads was officially launched by a proclamation from Traverse City Mayor Margaret Dodd, and author Leif Enger will be discussing the book on the air Friday morning with WTCM's Ron Jolly. Traverse City Reads is being sponsored by ForeWord magazine, the Friends of the Traverse Area District Library and Zonta International, with underwriting from Financial Investment Management Group, Hagerty Insurance, Old Town Playhouse, Northwestern Savings Bank and Printmasters. "Naturally, it isn't just open to people from Traverse City," said Sutherland. "We just didn't think Northwestern Michigan Reads sounded as good." |
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