One City One Book (also One Book One City, [City] Reads, On the Same Page, and other variations) is a generic name for a community reading program that attempts to get everyone in a city to read and discuss the same book. The name of the program is often reversed to One Book One City or is customized to name the city where it occurs. Popular book picks have been Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima.[1]
History
One City One Book programs take the idea of a localized book discussion club and expand it to cover a whole city.[2]
The first such program was "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" in 1998, started by Nancy Pearl at the Seattle Public Library's Washington Center for the Book.[3]
The book chosen for the program was The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks, written in 1991.[4] Other cities tried the idea, and the Library of Congress listed 404 programs occurring in 2007.[1]
These programs typically try to build a sense of community and sometimes promote literacy.[5]: 5 Nancy Pearl warns against expecting too much from a program: "Keep in mind that this is a library program, it's not an exercise in civics, it's not intended to have literature cure the racial divide. This is about a work of literature."[2] Some other activities that have been included are book discussion sessions, scholarly lectures on the book or related topics, a visit by the author, exhibits, related arts programming, and integration into school curricula.[5]: 20–23 In Boston, the "One City One Story" program distributed tens of thousands of free copies of the story over a month.
Programs sponsored by public libraries are tracked each year by the Library of Congress.[6] Most programs maintain their websites devoted to the annual effort.
United States
The Library of Congress maintains a website with resources, such as a partial list of authors and a list of past programs. Some states and the ALA maintain their resources.[7]
The National Endowment for the Arts has run The Big Read since 2006. The program gives grants to national communities each year for a book selected from The Big Read's library. New titles are added to the library every year.[8] Some colleges have begun One College, One Book programs in addition to other programs. The Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at the College of New Jersey has been running a One Book, One Department program for its students since 2008.
The concept has had a mixed reception. The literary critic Harold Bloom said, "I don't like these mass reading bees... It is rather like the idea that we are all going to pop out and eat Chicken McNuggets or something else horrid at once."[9] There have been concerns that the program would be used to promote social values. The essayist Phillip Lopate fears a promotion of groupthink, saying, "It is a little like a science fiction plot -- Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something."[9]
In 2002, the effort gained controversy in New York City when two groups of selectors each chose Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker and James McBride's The Color of Water, respectively. Both books were considered to be offensive to some of New York's ethnic groups.[2][10] Nancy Pearl said, "It's turned into something not to do with literature but to do with curing the ills in society, and while there is a role for that, to ask a book to fit everybody's agenda in talking about particular issues just does a disservice to literature."[11]
Governments are sometimes concerned that their endorsement of reading a book will be viewed as endorsing the ideas or language of the book. In 2006, the Galveston County Reads committee recommended Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as the choice for a Texas-wide read. There was much criticism of the choice from the Mayor and Council of Friendswood, who objected to obscenity in the novel, and said that it contained ideas that should not be promoted to children. They also believed that taxpayer money should not be used to promote and purchase a book the community would not approve of.[12]
