**

At the Mount Vernon, Ohio Farmer’s Market on a recent Saturday morning, the young Kenyon Review associates couldn’t give their last few copies of Louise Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine away. They were forced to leave their microphone and their makeshift stand advertising the NEA’s the Big Read program and offer free books to the farmers selling organic meat, cut zinnias, and bushels of tomatoes. None of the vendors were willing to take a book.

Refusing a free anything involves a sort of integrity—the local populace was turning down a book they were unlikely to read. Or was it that the local farmers saw the college students the way some of us might see the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Were they simply waving away what seemed to them the equivalent of a Watchtower pamphlet about Armageddon?

The Big Read was initiated in 2006 with the best of all possible motives: to counter-act a documented decline in reading, particularly among younger readers. Its pilot project asked ten communities to choose from four possible books. Chicago chose to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird during its “One Book, One Chicago” program; New York City was unable to agree on a single book to read. The Big Read has now spread throughout the country, into libraries and classrooms, and involves kickoff events, free book giveaways, author readings, discussion groups, and screenings.

But reading through the list of the thirty Big Read books, there is a whiff of Brussels sprouts—these particular books were chosen because somebody decided they were good for us. Rather than being filtered through a distinctive sensibility, it is clearly a list compiled by committee, designed to appeal to the various demographics that make up America. Although I am regularly infuriated by the exclusion of women writers on the “best of” lists and “emerging writer” rosters, I find myself equally annoyed by the careful, programmatic inclusion of women writers, Asian-American writers, Native-American writers, African-American writers, and that most marginalized group of all: poets.

In the square at Mt. Vernon that day, I was unable to resist the free book, which was bedecked with rapturous quotes from the critics. Yet as soon as I’d taken it, I began to resent the Big Read. I had my own bedside stack of books waiting to be read, and Erdrich, through no fault of hers, had jumped the queue. Because she was due to speak at Kenyon College, where I teach, in early November, I now had a deadline. Reading for pleasure had turned into homework—a feeling compounded by the NEA’s Reader’s Guide to Love Medicine foisted upon me when I took the book. (Sample Discussion Question: Is Lulu Lamartine a good person? Is she a sympathetic character? Why or why not? ) One is anxious to get one’s hands on a banned book—but a required book? That just isn’t sexy.

If you Google the list of the Big Read books, you might well wonder what I’m going on about. It’s true, some of the best books I’ve ever read are on that list: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. There are also those perfectly good books that have been ruined by their perpetual inclusion on high-school reading lists: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird. This high-school flashback is compounded by the way the website has organized the books into Themes: Coming of Age, Courage, Crime and Justice, Identity, Integrity, Loss, Love Stories, and Principles. (My principle is to beat it whenever thematic capital letters are trotted out.)

There are other books on the list that I haven’t read and undoubtedly should read and would probably even enjoy reading. But unless I’ve made some sort of New Year’s resolution involving Proust I prefer to stumble upon my next book. Somebody mentions a book at a party, I read an interview with Margaret Drabble and realize it’s been ages since I read Margaret Drabble, or I take a chance on a paperback I find at the annual public library tent sale. The Big Read is not unlike a national book club—and I’m still recovering from my one and only book club experience. I went because they were reading a book I was reading anyway, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, but one woman made herself the de facto expert because, like the author, she had been born in Brooklyn, and on that authority she held the discussion hostage for two hours.

As a writer myself, it is of course crazy to complain about our tax dollars being spent on getting people to read. Perhaps in the town square that day, there was a farmer’s daughter who took Louise Erdrich’s book home and read it, thereby discovering literature. As a result of the Big Read, she might decide to go to college, she might go West, she might become an English teacher, a librarian, or even a writer. All I’m saying is this: Please don’t take the fun out of reading by replacing it with worthiness.

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I recently finished Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, which clocked in at almost 600 pages and came in the unglamorous package of a frayed hardcover library book. There was no book jacket, no graphic design, and no testimonials from other writers. I took it out in mid-February and I finished it in late June. I read the book at the stately pace of a Victorian lady, reading a chapter in bed in the morning while my husband made breakfast. As a college professor, I’m allowed to check books out for an entire year. Otherwise I would have racked up a small fortune in library fines once I had exhausted all the legitimate renewals.

All novels involve entering another life, but this is particularly true of Angle of Repose, in which the narrator attempts to capture the entirety of his Victorian grandmother’s life, or at least the entirety of his grandparents’ marriage. Susan Burns Ward, a Hudson Valley debutante, writer and illustrator, is exiled to the West when she chooses, in her late twenties, to marry one of the last available men in her circle, a mining engineer. The book begins with the girlish hopes of its protagonist, moves on to womanly disappointments, and ends with an unexpectedly tragic final turn. The reader travels with the couple to Colorado, Idaho, Mexico, and, finally, Northern California.

Wallace Stegner

While Susan pines for her childhood friend Augusta, who remains in New York City, we marvel at the implicit real estate opportunities. What must it have been like to be in California before Hollywood and Silicon Valley? It crosses our 21st century minds that Susan is in love with Augusta, but it doesn’t seem to cross hers. We are convincingly plunked into another era where people don’t give voice to such things. Young children are left with East Coast relatives for yearlong stretches. Older sons are shipped off to East Coast boarding schools. I only learned that there was an extramarital affair percolating when I looked up the opaque title in an on-line literary encyclopedia. The emotions are so repressed that it’s even possible for the reader to miss them.

The narrator himself, whom one suspects of being a stand-in for the writer, wrestles with the length of the book. By page 440 he realizes that he’s only gotten as far as his grandmother’s 42nd year when she’d lived to 91. But that was the year in which the defining act of Susan Ward’s life took place, when she made a fatal choice that led to a tragic accident which doomed her to marital purgatory.

I did occasionally pick up other books during those four months, which involved a sort of literary infidelity. The books would sometimes be so different it felt as if I were married to a man but cheating on him with a leopard. I was so excited to find Wells Tower’s much-touted Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned at the public library that I brought it home and read it quickly, entering its largely male universe in the evenings, while still reading a ladylike chapter from Angle of Repose in the mornings.

As I neared the end of Angle of Repose, I was later and later to breakfast. For the first time I took the cumbersome book out of the house, although it added considerable heft to my beach bag. I expected to feel a great sense of accomplishment when I finished the book, but instead I felt lost, grief-stricken. It was a mixture of sadness for Susan Ward and a prickle of fear that I might yet ruin my own life—but mostly I wanted to be back in the middle of that book.

I know there are other books, maybe even better books, out there. I started Mary Gaitskill’s new collection of stories but it only made me miss Susan Ward’s discretion. In Angle of Repose, marital infidelity was something to be staved off, whereas Gaitskill’s heroines are all too eager to cede their sexual booty. Susan Ward gives over to passion once in her life (maybe, we’re not sure) and is punished swiftly, and in the worst possible way.

I know there are other Wallace Stegner books to read, but that’s like somebody suggesting you get a new puppy when your dog of fifteen years has just died. It might be the same breed—but it’s not your dog. Or, to honor the metaphor we began with, it’s like people suggesting that you “get back out there” the day after you’ve ended a long-term relationship.

I’ve lately begun a backwards process of buying books after I’ve read the library copies. It helps me through the grieving process to know that it’s still there on the shelf if I need it. In this way, important books stay with me, literally and figuratively. Like the people who pass through our lives, the books become part of who we are.

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