A Novel Idea Takes Wing in the Windy City

Seattle did it first. Los Angeles is doing it next. But this city of ethnic neighborhoods and exaggerated blue-collar grit--former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka likened the town and the team to “a bunch of guys named Grabowski”--is where the nation’s hottest intellectual trend really took off.

Mayor Richard M. Daley last fall asked every citizen in this city of 3 million to read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The response to One Book, One Chicago was electric.

The novel about a white lawyer who defends a black man accused of rape in a Southern town in the 1930s was checked out of public libraries more than 6,500 times in seven weeks. The paperback made its way up from 250th to 51st place on Amazon.com’s national sales list. The Chicago Bar Assn. held a mock trial of the courtroom drama depicted in the novel, in costume. The Chicago Public Library staged a marathon weekend screening of the movie version, starring Gregory Peck. And Daley, a popular mayor who is fond of planting flower beds and commissioning art to beautify the city, asked library officials to pick out a spring book. (They did, Elie Wiesel’s “Night.”)

Ever since, communities across the country have embraced the idea of reading a book together.

“There’s definitely been a buzz since Chicago did ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ” said Jim Quay, executive director of the California Humanities Council.

Inspired by Chicago’s example, the council will ask Californians this summer to read John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” At more than 600 pages, Steinbeck’s classic is hardly a typical beach book. Still, California officials seem confident the Joad family’s story of migrating from Oklahoma will appeal. “It’s a great read,” Quay said.

As for Los Angeles, Mayor James K. Hahn plans to ask residents this spring to read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

In an age of multimedia menus, with 24-hour cable TV and movies on demand, it might seem anachronistic that the low-tech book is occasioning this sudden civic interest. But some believe the surge of popularity for communal reading--not just by cities but also by book clubs and at bookstore events--is a direct response to the essential loneliness of modern life, an antidote to the “bowling alone” syndrome coined by Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam to describe the recent downturn in civic participation.

“You can go through an entire day without ever interacting with another human being on anything except the superficial,” said Nancy Pearl, executive director of the Washington Center for the Book that sparked the city-reads-a-book movement in Seattle in 1996. “There’s a thirst for conversation. People want to talk to people about important issues.”

While Seattle sponsored the first citywide reading (Russell Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter”), Pearl acknowledges that Chicago put the trend on the map. So as the phenomenon sparks interest around the world (Hong Kong and Trinidad and Tobago have requested information about Seattle’s program), it may not be simple to duplicate Chicago’s success.

Despite its image as an industrial town of stockyards and beefy politicians, Chicago has long had an affinity for the written word.

Oprah Winfrey lives here, and any book named as an Oprah’s Book Club choice can add millions of dollars to its sales. The American Library Assn., the largest and oldest such trade group in the world, has its headquarters here. And the national craze called Poetry Slam, a cross between a reading and a pro wrestling match, got its start here.

Chicago has produced its share of famous authors--Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Gwendolyn Brooks. It especially treasures writers with a fierce bond to the common man, such as Studs Terkel and Mike Royko. It also delights in readers who defy expectations--the colorful Bill Veeck, onetime owner of the Chicago White Sox baseball team, who once let a midget pinch hit in the major leagues and who loved a good book; Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, who was such a passionate reader that the city’s main public library was named in his honor; and Phil Jackson, who as coach of the Chicago Bulls gave each player a book to read every year.

“If you can hang with gas station attendants and university professors, that’s admired,” said Miles Harvey, a Chicago writer.

Once the nation’s second-largest city (it’s now at third, behind New York and Los Angeles), Chicago has long suffered from a “second city complex,” and Harvey thinks that accounts for its emphasis on self-learning.

“There’s more pride in it here,” said Harvey, whose acclaimed “Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime,” was researched in the Newberry Library here, which boasts an impressive map collection. “People still pride themselves on being regular Joes. They are not seething in anti-intellectualism. You might go into a bar and talk books with someone who doesn’t look like they read.”

Then too, there’s the city’s phone book of ethnic names. Chicago is home to the largest number of Polish descendants outside of Warsaw. There is a sizable and growing Latino population. The black and Jewish communities are prominent. For many Chicagoans, books are a connection to home, to the great authors of Ireland or Russia, to the literary tradition in Poland or Mexico. As a result, the Chicago Public Library buys books in 100 languages.

Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey, widely credited with the success of the One Book, One Chicago program, made sure that the selected books would attract not only the city’s many ethnic communities (the library bought copies in English, Spanish and Polish), but its teenagers as well.

She and other library officials envisioned “a nice little program [in which] we got strangers talking to strangers on trains and in coffee shops.”

But Daley had grander ambitions. The son of former Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ruled Chicago as a city boss, he marshaled the resources of the entire municipal government to ensure the widest possible participation, part of his wider effort to draw the city’s middle class back from the suburbs.

The city reached out to corporate sponsors. Local grocery chain Jewel-Osco teamed with regional corporate powerhouse Procter & Gamble and Borders to offer a $5 rebate on books at Borders for a purchase of three P&G; products. The city published a resource guide for teachers and distributed 40,000 lapel pins that asked, “Are you reading Mockingbird?” The library held book discussions, with professional moderators facilitating the conversations, including 12 for teenagers. High schools performed theatrical versions of the story. Starbucks, with 60 stores in the city, provided free coffee and pastries for any customers who participated in the book discussions, also moderated by library personnel.

The result is that “Mockingbird” became cool, said Carl Barnett, a personal trainer and artist-in-residence at Purdue University’s Black Cultural Center in West Lafayette, Ind. “Chicago likes trends. There was a nice feeling of belonging to something.”

The budget was not large--$37,100, including $400 for fans at the bar association’s mock trial--but the effect was. Librarians reported that patrons confessed to not having read a book for years, until the city’s effort made them feel part of something bigger.

“There’s a mythology in Chicago that we are a small town,” said Alex Kotlowitz, author of “There Are No Children Here,” a best-selling account of two boys who grow up poor in Chicago. “This is the most segregated city in the country, but there’s a sense that everybody’s connected.”

But not everyone in Chicago is buying into the civic pride. Several cabbies had never heard of the program. And a local essayist and short-story writer who teaches at Northwestern University, Joseph Epstein, was downright dismissive. “I have no sense whatever whether it has mattered a jot,” he said.

Others think Chicago’s embrace of reading together has less to do with literary tradition than with more prosaic factors, such as the weather.

Campbell McGrath, a poet and author of the award-winning “Spring Comes to Chicago,” moved to Florida 10 years ago. He thinks Seattle and Chicago share a gray-sky climate that makes curling up with a book indoors a natural. “I can’t tell you how excited I am when a gray sky comes along. There’s something about the long gray period of time that kind of throws you back into yourself philosophically.”

Then there are the long commutes by train. “Within a very short time of its founding, Chicago had thousands and thousands of railroad lines,” said Mary Wyly, associate librarian at the Newberry. “And there’s nothing handier than a book on a train.”

Julie Wong, communications director for Hahn, is well aware that Los Angeles has fewer trains--and sunnier weather. Still, she is hopeful about the spring book read.

“We may not have trains, but people here spend a lot of time in their cars and could listen to books on tape,” Wong said. “People want to feel a sense of community, especially in a city like L.A., which is so spread out.”

That may be the biggest dividend for the communities that try reading a book together and why the books selected differ so much.

Cognizant of its ethnic pluralities, Chicago is picking books that speak to racial tolerance. (Though Library Commissioner Dempsey suggests that “next time we may go much lighter.”) To bolster the relevance of Wiesel’s account of his Holocaust experience, Dempsey is planning discussions about ethnic cleansing, with panelists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Cambodia. For its part, Seattle tends to pick more esoteric books that most have not yet read, to educate and expand audiences.

For libraries, there is the further appeal of regaining the patrons who slipped away in the 1990s to those coffee-friendly events at Borders or Barnes & Noble. “We have stopped thinking about libraries as having a cultural mandate,” said Pearl, the Washington Center for the Book director. “Libraries should be the anchor.”

Whether read in libraries or at a Starbucks, on trains or via audiotape in cars, “To Kill a Mockingbird” gave Chicago one other unexpected advantage: a shared experience at a time of national grief. “After Sept. 11, interest galvanized,” Dempsey said. “It gave people a common thing to come together around: a book.”