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February 19, 2008 09:51 am
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Photos
Jerry Laizure/The Norman Transcript
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Literacy power?
“Getting people to read can get them to talk to their neighbors again."
By M. Scott Carter
CNHI News Service
NORMAN, Okla. — The act of reading a book could actually change a community for the better, a national book expert said.
David Kipen, director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts, said encouraging communities to read books and discuss them can also foster change by bringing people together.
“Getting people to read can get them to talk to their neighbors again,” Kipen said. “It’s another thing that plugging in doesn’t do.”
Kipen, in Norman to kick off the Pioneer Library System’s Big Read celebration Monday, said the program isn’t as much about literacy as it is encouraging people to pick up a book.
“Statistics show if you can get people to pick up the book, you form a habit,” he said. “We have a whole generation that is coming up which is falling away from newspapers and falling away from reading.”
And celebrating books, Kipen said, is a way to change that.
“Images are starting to supplant text, which is kinda dangerous, because then people lose the ability to make pictures in their head.”
Kipen isn’t the only one concerned.
According to the NEA’s study, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, “literary reading in America (is) declining rapidly among all groups, (and) the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”
That’s the reason behind a program such as The Big Read, he said.
Based on the “one city, one book” concept borrowed from programs in Seattle and Chicago, the pilot program started in 10 cities and was “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.”
NEA officials said the program brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.
“That’s the beauty of the program, everyone does something different,” he said.
The initiative includes reading programs in selected cities and towns, resources for discussing literature, a national publicity campaign and an Internet Web site providing comprehensive information on authors and their works.
Each community event lasts about one month and includes a kickoff event to launch the program locally, major events devoted specifically to the book (panel discussions, author reading and the like); events using the book as a point of departure and book discussions in diverse locations and aimed at a wide range of audiences.
A former book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kipen said the Big Read program has expanded to other countries, including Russia and Egypt.
“We’re going to Egypt,” he said. “They are going to read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and I believe it’s going to be as relevant now as it was. They are also going to be reading Steinbeck and Bradbury.”
The first priority, Kipen said, is to “get people to rediscover the pleasure of reading again.”
M. Scott Carter writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.
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