Celebrating books with The Great American Read

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

Have you heard about the new PBS show The Great American Read?  This is an eight-part television series about Americans’ favorite books.  The premiere was broadcast recently, and the final episode will air in October, when they will announce which book won first place in the voting. 

Host Meredith Vieira will introduce the 100 featured books, plus she will interview authors, celebrities, and regular people about how particular books have influenced them and our culture.  PBS is hosting a virtual book club on Facebook to discuss a couple of the books per week, and there will be some live public events, including some in select libraries across the country.  The public library in the little town of Cook, up in northern Minnesota, was the only library to receive the grant in our state. 

The list of America’s favorite 100 books was compiled by PBS and a polling service through a public survey asking people to name their most-loved novel.  Each author is represented only once, and book series are listed as one entry to increase variety in the list.  So, for example, the Harry Potter series is listed, rather than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  Books could be from anywhere in the world as long as they were published in English; only fiction was included.  The books span a wide range of time from the 1600s to 2016, as well as a wide range of genres and styles. 

Voting for favorite books has already opened online through the PBS website, and voting by phone will be available in the fall.  You can vote once per day.  It sounds a bit like American Idol for novels.

Our library’s adult book club has read some of the books on the list.  The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is an elegantly-written young adult novel narrated by Death.  An orphan named Liesel in Germany during World War II is taken in by the gentle Hans and his prickly wife Rosa, as is a young Jewish man named Max who needs a place to hide. Liesel becomes fast friends with Max as well as with Rudy, a scrappy, poor neighbor boy.  The friendships and the words in this book are beautiful, and it is a favorite of mine.

We have also read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, a quiet epistolary novel about generations of ministers in a small town in Iowa.  Members found it thought-provoking.  The Giver by Lois Lowry was another young adult novel we’ve read that most of the readers enjoyed; it’s an intriguing look at a supposedly utopian society.  We have also read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Martian by Andy Weir, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  I would say they are all worth reading.

The idea behind the series is to get people reading and talking about books.  This is a goal the library shares.  Look on the display on top of the DVD shelf to easily pick up some of the 100 books from the Great American Read. 

Go Read a Sequel

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee has had the literary world in an uproar recently.  The sequel to the classic To Kill a Mockingbird was announced in February to tremendous public astonishment, and the story of its discovery has been a bit mysterious.  Lee wrote it first, before Mockingbird, and it was entirely reworked into her classic novel when the publisher wanted something different.  Then the manuscript was apparently lost for 55 years.

 

The book itself was released July 14, to considerable debate.  Many of the reviews are negative, with some saying that reading it will forever tarnish your view of the original classic and its hero.  Others say that it’s a complex look at racial relations at the time it was written, and at how adult perspective can change our childhood idealization of people we love.  At the least it’s an interesting look at how Lee came to create her classic.

 Several reviewers have expressed sadness that Lee never wrote other books with the talent it displays.  One comment I thought was particularly good came from Library Journal: there are now two Atticus Finches, because reworked characters are a natural part of the writing process, and what we’re reading now is source material.

All of this made me think about whether other sequels to classic novels have been published and whether they have had any success.  Of course, there are many that have been written by different authors, many of those decades or even a century or more later.  But how often do the authors themselves dare to publish a follow-up to a great, successful novel that is not conceived as a series?

One that comes to mind immediately is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, sequel to The Hobbit.  I would say that it’s a clearly better literary work than the original, with far greater complexity and depth, although I have read reviews that disagree.  In any case, it was written and edited to be a finished novel about fifteen years after The Hobbit, not at all the same situation as Go Set a Watchman.  Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings rank among the best-selling books of all time.

The Giver is a modern classic children’s book by Lois Lowry.  It won the Newbery Medal in 1994.  Many have read it, but the three sequels aren’t as well-known, although they are good books.  Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son are loosely-related sequels that tie together in the last book.  We have all of these books at the Litchfield library.

Little Women is another classic that is widely read, but you may not know that Louisa May Alcott wrote two sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys.  Some people enjoy them, but they don’t have the same spark as the first.  One essay I read on Little Men said that this is because Jo is really not the same character as in the first book.  We have a new volume at the Litchfield library that includes all three books.

There are several other more-obscure sequels available to check out in our library.  These include The Starlight Barking, Dodie Smith’s sequel to One Hundred and One Dalmatians; Closing Time, Joseph Heller’s sequel to Catch-22; Son of Rosemary, Ira Levin’s sequel to Rosemary’s Baby; and That Was Then, This Is Now, S.E. Hinton’s sequel to The Outsiders.  All of these have produced some mixed reviews, if not the media frenzy Watchman has.  But then none of these original novels were To Kill a Mockingbird.

Go Set a Watchman does have a waiting list, but copies were going out to our customers the day after it came out.  Since Pioneerland Library System has many copies, the waiting list will move quickly.  Let us know if you’d like to reserve a copy and see for yourself what all the commotion is about.