February 17, 2009
Washington, DC

Big Read author Cynthia Ozick has more than a dozen books to her credit including a short story collection, collections of essays, and novels. In this excerpt from the Reader’s Guide for The Shawl, Ozick talks about becoming a writer and the difference between working on fiction and on critical essays.

NEA: Did you always want to be a writer?

OZICK: Always. It was a destiny that I never had any alternative, or wished for any alternative. I simply knew it, always. But I never even thought of myself as a writer until I had published a certain basic body of work because it seemed to me that it was hubris. Who would take me seriously? So if someone asked, “What do you do?”, it took me a long time before I could say, “I’m a writer.”

NEA: What is the difference for you between writing fiction and writing criticism?

OZICK: If you’re going to write an essay, let’s say, about Henry James, you have a subject, and you know something. If you’re going to write fiction, you have nothing. You begin in chaos. You may have a smell, a scene, a word, an idea, an emotion. It seems to me that ideas and emotions are inseparable. Emotions may not always be ideas, but ideas are always emotions. In fiction you can come up with something that you never knew you knew.

Want to learn more about Cynthia Ozick and The Shawl? Go to The Big Read Web site to check out the Big Reads underway by Caldwell Public Library (Caldwell, New Jersey) and Gadsen Cultural Arts Foundation (Gadsen, Alabama) this February.

April 16, 2008
Washington, DC

“Writing is power.” If I were a school teacher for a day, that’s the first thing I’d tell my students. “Don’t be afraid of a blank page of paper,” I’d declare. “With paper and a pen, you can create an entire universe. You might even change our world.” But would students believe me?

I got the chance to find out last week in Waukee, Iowa, when talking with middle and high school students. Seventh graders studying poetry at Waukee’s Middle School laughed at me when I claimed to be able to “control the space/time continuum.” That is, until I wrote two sentences on the board.

Dan went to bed at nine o’clock.

The next morning, he ate oatmeal for breakfast.

It’s a simplistic example but, between those two sentences we jump forward in time at least nine hours.

“Authors,” I told the students, “make time-travelers of us all.” Great writing can take us from the sublime garden of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Peonies,” to Ray Bradbury’s futuristic world of Fahrenheit 451, to Edith Wharton’s old New York in The Age of Innocence. What do these works of art have in common? They each began with a blank sheet of paper.

Cynthia Ozick transports us ahead three decades between the opening short story of The Shawl, which takes place during the Holocaust , and the book’s second section, set in the 1970s. As readers we accept this without reservation. The author has grasped us with her capable hand. We follow her without hesitation.

Waukee High School English teacher Ann Hanigan’s honors tenth graders stunned me with their insightful comments about the similarity between Rosa Lublin’s personality before the horrors of the Holocaust changed her life forever and that of her niece, Stella, thirty years later — after the pair had settled in the United States. They saw how each woman cared for the other, finding strength when the other was weak. In their eyes, The Shawl is as much a love story between these two women as it is “Holocaust fiction.”

I wish Cynthia Ozick could have been a fly on the wall of that classroom! The night before, she had graciously appeared at the Waukee Public Library via an internet conference, answering questions for more than an hour and a half. Charming and witty, Ozick immediately put everyone in the room at ease despite the book’s somber subject matter. The Big Read participants adored her.

The Waukee community benefited from the hard work of four fabulous women. Assistant Library Director Devon Murphy-Peterson and Rebecca Johnson, the President of the Waukee Library Board of Trustees, applied for The Big Read grant and plotted every aspect of programming. They recruited Ann Hanigan, the phenomenal high school English teacher, to encourage local middle and high school students to get involved. Jane Olson of the Waukee Area Arts Council added a wealth of knowledge about how to get local residents to attend events. “People come out to support their kids,” she told me. “Getting young people involved is so important.”

Perhaps nothing illustrates Waukee’s commitment to reaching young people better than The Big Read’s final event, a party at the library celebrating six weeks of reading and discussing The Shawl. Middle and high school students read their winning essays about the importance of literature in their lives. The Attic Door Theatre Company, a troop of teenage girls, performed a choral stage adaptation of the novel. Waukee High School culinary students baked truly tasty treats. Julie Kaufman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines surprised everyone by presenting the Waukee High School with funding for two teachers to travel to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

During all of these festivities the music of Eastern Europe was performed with zest by a local klezmer band, the Java Jews. Small children (and some not-so-small adults) were dancing the polka between the stacks. By the end of the evening, I was so moved that I could barely speak. Literature came alive that night — changing, transporting, and empowering us all.

March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA

When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.

Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.

I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:

Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon - - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”

Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”

And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…

February 15, 2008
Washington, DC

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

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.

“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.

July 4, 2007
Washington, DC

“You have a legacy of choice, and they say choice is the only true freedom.”
– from The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

It’s Independence Day. I woke this morning thinking of my father, an Air Force pilot who, despite his gruff exterior, could be a real kid at heart. This was his favorite holiday. When I was growing up, we spent every Fourth of July at our lake cabin. My father drove our boat in circles under the hot July sun so my friends could learn to water ski. At night, he pulled a crumpled paper bag of bottle rockets and Roman candles out of his closet, gave us a lecture on safety, then sat on the patio between my mother and a can of OFF hoping to keep the mosquitoes at bay long enough to watch our amateur fireworks show.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo by Nancy Crampton

The second thing I thought about this morning was Cynthia Ozick. Last week she was kind enough to join the staff of the Arts Endowment via teleconference for a discussion of her book, The Shawl. Ozick’s voice is soft and crystalline, the kind of voice that brings to mind both dictionaries and mountain streams because each crisp word is selected with care then pronounced with flowing precision. She is kind and generous, brilliant and funny.

In The Shawl, Rosa Lublin watches a guard in a Polish concentration camp murder her fifteen-month-old daughter. More than thirty years later, Rosa is living in Miami but is unable to move past the horror and brutality of the Holocaust. Ozick’s writing has been called “fierce” and “concentrated” and, while I won’t disagree that it is both of these, it is far more than that. For me, reading the seventy pages of this book is like watching a display of mental fireworks that rivals the Fourth of July celebration I’ll attend later tonight in D. C.

Ozick understands the power of words. She uses metaphor and symbolism with magical control. She thinks of metaphor as “the mind’s opposable thumb” and says, “Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger’s heart.”

The two powerful stories that comprise the book each won the O. Henry Prize, “The Shawl” in 1981 and “Rosa” in 1984. My colleagues asked Ozick about her writing method. She is not a “draft writer.” Instead, she spends hours perfecting each sentence before going on to the next. I love the idea of Ozick turning words against the sharp lathe of her mind until the rough edges are shorn away. [A confession: I’ve been trying her technique as I write this blog but have failed; fragments of ideas are already constructed below. I’m a draft writer, a draft horse that has to pull an idea out of a forest of confusion until it can reach the clearings of my mind.]

Ozick believes the deliberate extermination of more than six million European Jews during the Holocaust is a “black hole” in the history of humanity, a time without light or redemption, and she expresses discomfort with any attempt to fictionalize it — even her own. Yet she concedes that witnessing these events, even in fictional form, can change us. “We can’t put a ladle into history and re-stir it to make the ingredients and the bad taste of it come out different,” she says, “That we cannot do. But we can certainly change ourselves by opening ourselves to the pain and grief of others.”

The same evening of the NEA’s teleconference with Ozick, I led the discussion for the first-ever book club meeting in my condo building. Selecting a title for a group discussion can be tricky. Of course it’s important for the book to be well written, have good character development, a solid plot structure — all of those ‘technical’ criteria we use to judge literature because we can’t put a label on what makes a piece of writing transcend the page. In my opinion, the best conversations are generated when the ideals expressed in a book address the human condition, the commonality of mankind’s experience on this earth.

My neighbors discussed The Shawl for more than two hours. As they talked, Rosa became corporeal, a real presence in the room. She wasn’t just a character in a novel they read because their neighbor is a book-geek that works on the Big Read. Rosa breathed. She gave birth. She suffered at the hands of humans not unlike us. It was one of those beautiful moments where I was blessed to experience again why literature matters.

In April 2005, in an Op-Ed piece for the L.A. Times, Salman Rushdie wrote, “One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.”

I love The Shawl. Beginning in January 2008, Big Read communities across the nation will have the chance to love it too.