March was named for Mars, the Roman god of war. According to the Reader’s Guide for Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms – one of three Big Read titles that addresses war– the novel “became Hemingway’s first bestseller, selling 100,000 copies in twelve months. It was adapted for the stage a year later and has been made into a film twice.” Learn more about Hemingway and his novel from the Reader’s Guide. And coming to the Web site this fall, more on Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the other two Big Read books that take wartime as their setting.

February 25, 2009
Washington, DC

The 81st Academy Awards are already receding into the distant past — who knew Anne Hathaway could sing!?! — but still it’s worth noting that four film versions of Big Read titles have received Best Picture noms. A Farewell to Arms (1931-32), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) all made Oscar’s Best Picture short list, although none took home top flick gold.

From the Readers’s Guide to The Grapes of Wrath, here’s John Steinbeck’s response to his first look at 20th Century-Fox’s take on his novel:

“[Producer Darryl] Zanuck has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring . . . it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true.”

Learn more about Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath in the Reader’s Guide.

November 12, 2008
Washington, DC

In honor of Veteran’s Day, it seems fitting to pay tribute to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, born out of Hemingway’s own experiences in World War I. From the Reader’s Guide, here’s an excerpt about Hemingway’s war service from the essay, “Hemingway and World War I.”

Ernest Hemingway was determined to be part of the action, but an eye defect kept him out of the main branches of the military. Hemingway was undaunted. In April of 1918, he applied to the Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy and was accepted. He passed his physical exam and was fitted for a uniform that gave him the honorary rank of 1st Lieutenant.

Hemingway arrived in Milan in early June and was stationed at Schio in the Dolomite hills northwest of Venice. He saw little action. Frustrated, and with a desire to be closer to the front, Hemingway requested transfer to the Red Cross’s “rolling canteen” service, which operated along the more contested Piave River.

He had only been in Italy for about two weeks when he was nearly killed just after midnight on July 12, 1918, while distributing chocolate and cigarettes. The fragments of an Austrian trench mortar shell (called a Minenwerfer) ripped into Hemingway’s legs and killed several men around him. Despite his own wounds, he heaved one injured man into a fireman’s carry and began to move him back toward the command post. A machine gun then ripped open Hemingway’s right knee. The two men collapsed but somehow made it to safety. For this feat, Hemingway would later be awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra — the silver medal for valor.

Learn more about Aurora Public Library’s (Illinois) Big Read of A Farewell to Arms at www.neabigread.org.

December 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Sometimes, even if the picture won’t win any prizes, the subjects are the story. Snapped here are Big Read partners Jane Wood and Henry Fortunato, flanking a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Jane presumably brings the same dynamism to chairing the English department at Park University that she’s brought to co-organizing a Big Read, while bemused, voluble Henry directs public affairs at the nearby Kansas City Public Library. Darwin, meanwhile, helped start World War I, if you believe a text panel accompanying this display inside Kansas City’s new National World War I Museum (one of Jane and Henry’s Big Read partners). But more about that later.

It was my privilege to fly into Kansas City two weekends ago for the finale of their salute to A Farewell to Arms. What I saw there capped a series of fine recent Reads, each superlative in its own way. Attleboro, Mass., whose Fahrenheit 451 Read I posted about not long ago, drummed up some of the strongest school participation I’ve seen yet. Rochester, N.Y. — not surprisingly, in light of its Kodak history and consequent movie madness — programmed an ambitious film series around The Maltese Falcon, and created a readable, handy, stylish Big Read calendar that could serve as a model for Big Read cities everywhere. And in White Plains, a SUNY Purchase English professor hosted an absolutely exemplary book discussion, putting aside academic jargon to engage a score of townspeople whose demographics rivaled Pauline Kael’s proverbial World War II movie bomber crew for diversity.

Back in Missouri, the celebration of A Farewell to Arms combined sturdy versions of these three Big Read components with a positively unprecedented amount of workplace participation. At least five local corporations distributed books to their employees and invited an especially industrious KCPL librarian to lead office discussions. Kansas City Star arts columnist and book critic Steve Paul, who had already keynoted KC’s kickoff event with a talk about Hemingway’s year as a cub reporter at his newspaper, moderated a reputedly overflow office book group at the international headquarters of Hallmark. (If you see a spate of Hemingwayesque greetings cards in the coming months, feel free to blame the Big Read.) All these so-called “Corporation Big Reads” must’ve gone over well, because every last company involved is already clamoring to know which book — Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, in particular, came up — they want to do next year.

On the Origin of Species, as a work of British nonfiction, won’t be appearing on the Big Read list anytime soon. But its prominent placement in the WWI Museum raises the question of its alleged role in the runup to the war that wounded Hemingway and so many others. It’s an interesting hypothesis, casting a gentle naturalist’s case for the theory of natural selection as the trigger for what became, in its time, probably the bloodiest war in human history. All the combatant countries had considered themselves “naturally selected” for greatness, of course, and assumed that in a war of all against all, they’d surely come out on top. None of them was right.

Lincoln once called Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little lady who made this big war.” So, did Darwin really help make an even bigger one? Me, I’d hang more of the blame on the British political economist Herbert Spencer. He’s the one who perverted “natural selection” into “survival of the fittest” — a phrase Darwin never used.

But there’s another dimension to all this. Kansas has played host to some of the most contested litigation in recent years over the teaching of evolution. By placing Darwin in one of the very first display cases at the World War I Museum, our docent noted that curators were implicitly defending a book often under attack elsewhere in their state.

Then again, they were also blaming a five-year bloodbath on that same treatise. Books are dicey things, and mean different things to different people. To Kansas City, A Farewell to Arms has meant the chance to come together around a single book in their schools, their libraries, their spectacular new museum and, most originally, around the office water cooler. Only light, not blood, was shed. Arguments broke out in book groups all across town, but no gunplay. To my knowledge, no book discussion has ever ended in violence.

Might make a good novel, though. Watch this space.

September 25, 2007
Oak Park, Illinois

Two things I learned in Oak Park, Ill.: 1) roughly a third of the world’s fresh water is in the Great Lakes, and 2) roughly a third of America’s creativity grew up or flowered in Oak Park. OK, I’m exaggerating, but it’s not just O.P.-reared Ernest Hemingway, the Big Read of whose A Farewell to Arms recently brought me to this idyllic village on the outskirts of Chicago.

Just check out this honor roll of American writing born or bred in Oak Park (deep breath): Charles Simic, America’s new poet laureate; poet Kenneth Fearing, whose mystery novels include The Generous Heart (my boss’s favorite) and The Big Clock, later adapted by Jonathan Latimer into a terrific film noir with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton; Charles MacArthur, who co-wrote The Front Page with Ben Hecht and once, when writing for the Chicago papers about a dentist accused of taking liberties with his female patients, improvised the headline “Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity”; Carol Shields, who wrote The Stone Diaries and other lovely novels; Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created Tarzan and improbably gave my boss the reading bug with his novel Princess of Mars; and, so you shouldn’t think Oak Park’s distinctions are strictly literary, Frank Lloyd Wright. Not bad for a town Hemingway chided for its “broad lawns and narrow minds” — though if you can cough up a provable citation for that quote, still-skeptical Oak Parkers will stand you to lunch.

Why would so much talent cluster in one place? According to local Redd Griffin, there’s a theory in Malcolm Cowley’s book A Second Flowering to the effect that the best writers come from the penumbra between town and country. There, the young artist grows up equidistant from, and responsive to, big-city sophistication and natural beauty alike.

Me, I say if you really want literary greatness, see to it that your father goes bankrupt. I’m serious. Fitzgerald, Dickens, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Hemingway, quite probably Shakespeare — each of these had his social awareness sharpened from an early age as a failure’s son. Anyway, that’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it.

The Oak Park Public Library and its partners are showing visitors and their neighbors such a good time this month, yet here I am nattering away about genius clusters. My two days in Oak Park began with a screening of the 1932 A Farewell to Arms, expertly intro’d and outro’d by genial film studies prof Doug Deuchler. The movie itself is an agreeable curiosity, with a stolidly sturdy Gary Cooper and a bracingly untheatrical Helen Hayes in the leads.

Then it was off to the Hemingway Foundation’s capacious museum, which does on a shoestring what the Steinbeck Center so professionally accomplishes in Salinas: It refreshes, through well-chosen artifacts and well-written text panels, a sense of the man and a thirst for his books. In addition to a cavalcade of dedicated board members and local philanthropists, I also met Aaron Mrozick, the impressive college student in this picture. He impersonated the young Hem far more convincingly than I impersonated a keynote speaker, and gave me new hope that Hemingway can speak to a younger readership beyond the obligatory English majors and fly-fishermen.

Next morning I took a fascinating tour of Hemingway’s birthplace and childhood home, lovingly restored by the Foundation after decades spent virtually unrecognizable as a boardinghouse. Next on this outfit’s to-do list is the sprucing up of Hemingway’s teenage family home, just a few blocks away. Later I met up with David Krause of nearby Dominican University, whose new gig on campus portends great things for Hemingway in particular and crosstown relations in general. Dominican and the Foundation are just two more examples of high-minded neighboring organizations with slightly overlapping missions who might never have found their way into each other’s Rolodexes if not for a certain nationwide reading program.

I could rhapsodize about the two sensational meals I had with Oak Park library executive director Deirdre Brennan, Keith Michael Fiels of the American Library Association, the Oak Park libe’s gifted P.I.O., Deborah Preiser and other dignitaries, but it would only make you hungry. Suffice it to say that, after a night of Italian food in neighboring River Forest, Hemingway himself would have forgiven the retreat at Caporetto…

“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 9, 2007
Washington, DC

No two people ever read the same book. Partly, this is because few people ever read the same two books in a row. Every book we read, we also read juxtaposed against the book before and the one after.

For example, if you read the first 21st-century novel on the Big Read list, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, back to back with Big Read mainstay The Joy Luck Club, you might come away reflecting on the ways two very different short story writers have transmuted a few rudiments of their personal histories into their first acknowledged novels. (Wolff had a rookie effort he’s not real proud of.) But if you read a doubleheader of Old School and, to pick another Big Read title, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, what jumps out at you might be how two self-deceiving male protagonists look back on their lives and justify their mistakes.

The Banned Authors monument in Berlin. Source: Flickr

I mention this because the importance of reading juxtaposition also goes for newspaper articles. Here’s a quote from a piece in the August issue of The Hill Rag, a better than average neighborhood newspaper here in town, about D.C.’s retooled Southeast Branch Library:

[Some readers, like Friends of Southeast Library’s] Wendy Blair, believe the Southeast collection now suffers from citywide library policies that sell readers short. “The idea that a library is a repository of the books you can’t buy or keep at home seems to have been shelved,” said Blair. “And the choice of which books — lots of Danielle Steele, no Jane Austen — seems sad.”

Taken by itself, this is interesting enough. It recalls the flurry of attention in the Washington Post and elsewhere last year when it came out that a Virginia library system was weeding its holdings based on circulation numbers. (Sadly needless to add, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and many other American classics were taking it on the chin.)

Now, watch what happens when you read that Hill Rag graf alongside this, from a recent issue of the South Jersey Courier-Post:

“The [school] board also passed a resolution affirming the use of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in the high school English curriculum. The vote was 6-2…A committee reviewed the novel, which details the lives of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, after a resident complained of passages described as sexual in nature.”

This, too, shouldn’t shock anybody who’s already noticed the curriculum wars bedeviling American school districts lately. But read it within a few days of that library-weeding piece, and it gives rise to the following modest proposal:
What would happen if an American library user (or parent) challenged a book, not on grounds of obscenity, or sacrilege, or any of the other reasons usually trotted out with the best of intentions — but because the book stinks?

Put another way, what if somebody challenged any of the widely read but unspectacular novelists whom libraries regularly stock in quintuplicate, solely because the potboiler is just flat-out not as good as the one copy of Sense and Sensibility it would displace?

Whoa, you say. Doesn’t that put local boards in the position of making subjective judgments? Yes — but that’s exactly what they’re already doing! Deciding whether a book qualifies as profane or blasphemous is every bit as subjective as weighing in on its literary value.

Unlike “appropriateness challenges,” though, “quality challenges” would get cities and towns talking about what really matters in literature, e.g., how much fun it is, how interesting it can be to talk about, how good language can work a reader over on frequencies, and at depths, that nothing else can quite reach. That, or it’ll make a mockery of book challenges altogether, which might not be so bad either. Either way, it’ll get people talking about books in terms of how good or bad they are, in addition to how godless or dirty.

All I’m saying is, if somebody else gets to challenge a venturesome book because the sight of it makes them want to cover their eyes, then I should have the same privilege because a bad book makes me want to hold my nose. Whether I have that privilege, we’ll find out when I visit the Southeast Library this week and try to challenge the worst book I can find…

July 19, 2007
Washington, DC

“Mom, which one of us do you love best?” It’s a question my mother would never answer, but each of us had our suspicions — depending on which of us had just pitched marbles into her demitasse set (oldest brother), taken the pinking shears to her hand-sewn curtains to see the zig-zag pattern (me), or scratched his name backward — to avoid detection — into the hallway wall (older brother). Still, despite moments of being in or out of favor, none of us ever earned a declared status of favorite.

I don’t have children. I do, however, at middle age, have a child’s habit of secretly personifying inanimate objects — such as books. My husband has caught on to this, and while not suggesting therapy outright, he has hinted that this is something I should have gotten over somewhere between Barbie and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

It’s not as if I stand in the stacks and have conversations with Louisa May Alcott. But I have been known to look at a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and whisper, “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum,” by way of a greeting. To the book.

And yet, I am able to drive a car and hold a responsible job. Go figure.

I am the Director of Communications here at the National Endowment for the Arts, and it’s my department that tells the world about the Big Read, among our many other worthy NEA endeavors.

To me, while a book, a song, a painting, or a — wait for it — Broadway musical may not have a beating heart or knowing brain, it has a life. One that affects my life. Unlike my mother, I am able to pick favorites. (But keep this to yourselves. I don’t want The Wizard of Earthsea to feel bad that I like The Age of Innocence better.) I spend as much time with novels as I do with friends. And when I put one down, I need a day or two before I’m ready to pick up another. I need some time to reflect on our conversation. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye.

Of all our Big Read books, I do have a favorite. It’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve read and reread it. I’ve watched and rewatched the movie. I named my cat Atticus. (I said I don’t have children.)

I’ve read some of the learned arguments about why it doesn’t really deserve its vaunted position in the American literary cannon. From Tom Mallon’s 2006 New Yorker essay: “More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound…”, to Truman Capote’s alleged, “I, frankly, don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Although I’m a fan of both Mallon and Capote, I don’t care what they say. To Kill a Mockingbird is my sentimental favorite.

It’s a book I first read somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. It’s the book that took me from The Hardy Boys (I just never could get into Nancy Drew — even if Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were the same person) and Little Women into the world of grown up literature — a trip I wasn’t that eager to make.

I confess fully and ashamedly to being a lazy child. Always doing what was required and no more, and if there were a way I could do less, I would–including reading. I was happy to read — I just didn’t want to work at it. (Embarrassing disclosure: the first time I read Call of the Wild was in a Classic Comic Book.) And I was happier to watch I Love Lucy reruns than I was to read.

It was my marble-pitching oldest brother — one of those so-smart-he-skipped-a-grade overachievers who handed me his paperback copy of Mockingbird and said, “Read this.” I did. Then he gave me The Yearling. I read that. Then The Member of the Wedding. Then A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then 0 Pioneers! Then Country of the Pointed Firs. Then The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Then eventually Tom Jones and all of Jane Austen. (Okay, I also read Valley of the Dolls and Love Story but I swear I never picked up Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I expanded into plays reading all of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams.

And yes, I talk to them all. Including in dialects, where appropriate. I can’t help it. And to be honest, I don’t want to. The characters in these books are as real to me as my childhood imaginary friend, Judy.

With the Big Read, our goal may not be a nation of readers conversing with their little friends from literature, but it is bringing the joy of discovery of good books — and good friends — to people who either have forgotten that simple pleasure or who never have had the pleasure. We are eager to have people experience the possibilities of language and storytelling, the fun of discussing, agreeing and disagreeing, the power of broadened perspective and of new conversations and conversions.

Reading moved Montag from being a “fire man” to a thinking man. If I lived in Ray Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, I would go into the woods and memorize To Kill a Mockingbird. From “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…,” to “…and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” And then Scout, Judy, and I would go talk about it some more….

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …

April 27, 2007
Miami, Florida

“And God keeps his appointment with Miami every sundown. Berthed on the east of Biscayne Bay, I can look to the western side, which I never fail to come top-side and do around sunset. Thus I get the benefit of his slashing paint brush all the way…The show is changed every day, but every performance is superb.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, in a winter 1950 letter

Miami has been reading that erstwhile Floridian Ernest Hemingway, not Hurston, but it’s always intriguing when two Big Read authors cross paths. There’ll even be a three-way confluence in Florida next January, when Cynthia Ozick’s largely Miami-set The Shawl joins eight other new books on the Big Read list. What other state boasts three Big Read books/authors, you ask? Answer, as they say, below…

Meantime, my Miami visit got off to a cuddly start with the unmistakable Michelin-man outline of a manatee, floating 17 stories beneath my hotel window and in no particular hurry. I, on the other hand, dashed downstairs to stroke, feed, or otherwise disturb the native fauna. Alas, by the time I got there, nature’s closest approximation of an inflatable pool toy had drifted off down the canal somewhere.

Who couldn’t write great literature at a desk like this, with a fishing reel and a stuffed oryx nearby, plus all your visitors safely behind a locked wrought-iron cage? Photo by David Kipen

Luckily, Alina Interian and Roselyne Pirson of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts drove up around then and spirited me out for a friendly debrief over lunch. Having met them last year during South Florida’s pilot-phase Read of Fahrenheit 451, I knew what to expect: never any apple-polishing, just unalloyed honesty. Alina wasn’t shy about wishing for some newer books on the list, so I was happy to trot out all the new titles for her. Just to be contrary, I started with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, savoring her mortification before throwing out our first 21st-century novel, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, plus all the others spaced more or less evenly between ‘em.

But at this rate, I’ll never get to the finale of the south Florida Big Read, a bus tour — which turned into a bus caravan, it was so oversubscribed — to Hemingway’s house on Key West. In preparation I’d read not just A Farewell to Arms but To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only book set in Florida (or for that matter in the United States, unless you count the Nick Adams stories). William Faulkner and Jules Furthman’s script for the Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie is more successful as a work of art, but boy is the book underrated. It’s got Hemingway’s best description of deep-sea fishing and his fullest, most ominous meditation on suicide. That’s not Bacall purring “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” but it ain’t hay.

Why waste time comparing apples and oranges, though, when you can eat frozen chocolate-covered Key lime pie on a stick? That was me, nuzzled by Hemingway’s bigger-than-ever army of six-toed cats, planted inside the security cage in the doorway of his second-floor writing study, just basking in the aura. I know it was juvenile, closer to fandom than to literary criticism. But after Hemingway’s Key West author Stuart McIvor’s informative lecture downstairs, we’d had our quota of literary criticism. It was time for a little basking, and I was more than equal to the task.

It all took me back to my first experience with Hemingway. I was in high school, and the teacher (more likely the school district, I now realize) had assigned The Sun Also Rises. The book possessed me so thoroughly that I wound up dragooning two classmates into a woefully underplanned troutfishing expedition into the High Sierra. All I remember now is devouring an entire delicious bagful of Snickers bars, heedless of the worm blood and fish scales on my fingers. That wasn’t literary criticism either, but it did for literature what literature does for life: flavor it, hallow it, light it up with Hurston’s “slashing paint brush” until it becomes something else, something finer.

And speaking of the High Sierra, the first state besides Florida to notch three Big Read books or authors is, you guessed it, California, with The Joy Luck Club, The Maltese Falcon, and at least half of The Grapes of Wrath. When I get to still-unrepresented Utah next month, I may have some explaining to do…