Ball, Book and Black Tie: An Opportunity to Read

As one who attends a good many black-tie banquets, I was delighted recently to receive an invitation to “The Stay Home and Read a Book Ball.”

This “novel event,” as they called it, is sponsored by the Los Angeles Library Assn. (LALA), which has supported the Los Angeles Public Library since 1872. The invitation requested “the pleasure of your company . . . Thursday, the 26th of April, at any time o’clock wherever you are.”

In a separate letter I was invited to autograph two of my books to be used as door prizes. I didn’t know how there could be door prizes to an event that had no door, but I complied.

One of the signatories of the letter was Nancy Dannevik, liaison for LALA’s authors advisory committee. I phoned her and asked her how the ball worked.

She explained, quite accurately, that when you go to a real ball you have to “wear a tuxedo and uncomfortable shoes and eat rubber chicken.” And you spend a lot of money, most of which goes for food and valet parking and a ballroom and table service. Not a lot gets through to the cause. This way, she pointed out, your contribution goes directly to the cause, with a minimum of overhead, and you stay home in comfort and read a book.

She said the Writers Guild was cooperating by giving LALA its mailing list. “After all,” she said, “movies are very popular, and where do the writers go to get ideas for their scripts? Books.”

She couldn’t be more right. Think of the wonderful movies that have come directly from books. “The Bible,” for one. What screenwriter could have turned that one out without divine assistance? What about “The Ten Commandments”? We’d never have seen Charlton Heston part the Red Sea if it hadn’t been for Exodus. Even such pseudo-historical movies as “Gone With the Wind” have come from books, and such science-fiction classics as “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” And don’t forget “Les Miserables.”

The Stay at Home and Read a Book Ball will give many of us a chance to read those books we’ve always meant to read but never had the time for. I may take another crack at “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes” by Stephen Hawking, which is supposed to be accessible to the layman, but which I found rather intimidating the first time out.

Also standing patiently on my shelf--put there with the most honorable of intentions--are “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design” by Richard Dawkins, and “Infinite in All Directions” by Freeman Dyson. I have made several passes as these books, but somehow I always end up reading a detective novel by Robert B. Parker or Elmore Leonard.

I think I’m pretty well up on Jane Austen. I try to read one of her books every year. There is something very modern about Jane. She is a true progenitor of Jacqueline Briskin and other contemporary women authors. On the other hand, I may read one of the classics that I missed as a boy: perhaps “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper. What a chance to fill in a blank spot in my education!

The other night we saw a movie on TV called “Major League,” about a baseball player who was getting his second chance in the majors. But he had lost his girlfriend because she was a librarian and he had never even read “Moby Dick.” We see him on the team plane reading “Moby Dick.” So it’s only a comic book version. At least it’s a book. (He gets the girl back.)

There is nothing to keep one from rereading an old favorite. A really good book is better the second time. I may have a second go at Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise,” which I liked much better than Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Or I might go back to one of Peter De Vries’ comic classics, like “Comfort Me With Apples.”

That’s what the Stay at Home and Read a Book Ball is all about. You stay home and you read a book. Any book. Meanwhile, you pay for the privilege by making a contribution to LALA, P.O. Box 71547, Los Angeles, Calif. 90071. You have until May 15 to qualify for a door prize.