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.
Contents
History
One City One Book programs take the idea of a localized book discussion club and expand it to cover a whole city. The first such program was "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" in 1998, started by Nancy Pearl at Seattle Public Library's Washington Center for the Book. The book chosen for the program was 'The Sweet Hereafter' by Russell Banks, written in 1991. Other cities copied the idea, and the Library of Congress listed 404 programs occurring in 2007.
Each city's program has its own goals; these typically include building a sense of community and promoting literacy. 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."
Programs typically involve more than having everyone read the same book. 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 (especially showing a movie of the book if there is one), and integration into school curricula. In Boston the "One City One Story" program used shorter stories and distributed tens of thousands of free copies of the story over the course of a month.
American Library Association puts out a detailed step-by-step guide on how to organize a local program, including the critical step of picking the one book. The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress tracks all known programs and the books they have used.
Significant "One Book" programs
Most listed are in the United States, perhaps because the meme started there and similar programs elsewhere have a different name.
Programs sponsored by public libraries are tracked each year by the Library of Congress. Most programs maintain their own websites devoted to the annual effort.
USA
The Library of Congress maintains a website with resources for cities that want to run One Book programs, including a partial list of authors and list of past programs. Some states and the ALA maintain their own resources to help cities get started.
United Kingdom
City Reads, Brighton is the longest running and most consistent 'big read' in the UK. Led by artistic director Sarah Hutchings, it is delivered by award winning literary organisation Collected Works CIC. City Reads is an annual collective reading festival conceived to spread a love of books and ideas to the widest possible audience throughout Brighton & Hove, with a healthy reach into the South East region. Over three weeks in October one book is chosen for the whole community to creatively engage with in a series of special events, workshops and performances. Through the outstanding quality of its work, its ability to foster collaboration and the partnerships that support the Festival, City Reads brings regional and national attention to the importance of shared reading and the benefits it can bring to the whole community. 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of City Reads, Brighton. The City Reads slogan is: One city. One book. A thousand conversations... The Festival began in 2005 when the City celebrated Penguin Books' 70th Anniversary and read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In 2013, with the support of writer, broadcaster and former children's laureate Michael Rosen Young City Reads was launched. Working with primary aged children at KS2 level, Young City Reads is thought to be the first 'big read' for children in the UK, on such a large scale.
Southampton University: One Book, One Southampton (OBOS) is the University of Southampton’s initiative to engage with our community through reading. Similar initiatives have been trialled in other institutions internationally, but there are very few UK University One Book programmes. The University encourage staff, students and our local and international community to join us in debates, lectures, talks and online forums to discuss OBOS and explore the themes, subjects and debates that the book raises. You can listen to discussions on the subject, and attend events about the book. The University of Southampton announced that the 2014 book will be Empire by Jeremy Paxman.
Alternate programs
Some cities that have run independent One Book programs have later joined Big Read instead. An annual "One World, Many Stories" summer reading campaign for children, which has a single selection for the country, has become popular as well.
Critical responses
For some, the mere idea of reading as a communal activity is repellent. 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."
Others are concerned about the temptation to use such a program to promote social values. Phillip Lopate fears a promotion of groupthink, saying "It is a little like a science fiction plot -- 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' or something."
In New York City in 2002, the effort foundered when the selectors split into two rival groups, each with its own favorite: Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker and James McBride's The Color of Water. Both books were considered to be offensive to some of New York's ethnic groups. 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."
Governments are sometimes concerned that their endorsement of reading a book will be viewed as endorsing the ideas or language of the book. In Texas 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 their county-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 kids and that taxpayer money should not be used to promote and purchase a book the community wouldn't approve of.