Western Book Roundup

Choose Your Own Adventure with One Book One Denver

By Jenny Shank, 6-10-09

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is trying a new approach with this year’s One Book One Denver selection—he’s letting people vote on what book they want to read from a list of 27 books that cater to almost every possible interest group, save those who would like to see a Colorado author selected.  It looks like a reading list for high schoolers getting ready to take A.P. English—it has that whiff of enforced homework about it.

There are a lot of books I love on the list, including a couple of my all-time favorites: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  But even these beloved books don’t have the appropriate feel you need to rally people around a community book program.  The choice should be a book that everybody hasn’t already read, something that is fresh, interesting, and perhaps a little controversial.  Hasn’t everyone already read To Kill A Mockingbird?  One frequent community reading pick is T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain (not on the list), which brings up the topics of illegal immigration and development run amok.

To vote, you need to get a user name and password from the One Book One Denver homepage.  I’m leaning toward a couple of my girls: Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.  I’ve loved Cather since I was a kid, and have even made a pilgrimage out to Red Cloud to see where she grew up (Plus my mom comes from a family of Bohemian immigrants to Nebraska, like Ántonia).  But Erdrich is one of the most compelling fiction writers working today.  I wish they would have picked something newer from her--Love Medicine was Erdrich’s first novel, published in 1984, and she’s been writing so many great ones recently, including 2001’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and her most recent novel, The Plague of Doves.  But it looks like to make it on this list, a book had to be at least semi-canonized.

There’s one book that’s not on the list should be there—Kent Haruf’s Plainsong.  Several people in the Denver Post’s recent article about the program pointed out this glaring omission, and I’m adding my voice to that chorus.  If there was ever a perfect selection for One Book One Denver, it’s Plainsong.  I interviewed Haruf last year, and he seemed to think that Hickenlooper has chafed under people’s constant request for this book to be featured.  Here’s what he said when I spoke to him in February of 2008:

“All of the choices have been pretty good,” Haruf said, “but they need to figure out how to do it better than they’ve been doing it, so it can get the attention it deserves.”

Haruf mentioned that the program’s refusal to select Plainsong “is water under the bridge at this point,” and that the book has been featured by many other cities and towns across the country in their community reading programs.

“My complaint would be that the mayor’s office has some final say on it,” Haruf said.  “I think it’s a dangerous thing, always, to have politics involved in the determination of what’s art and what art should be available to the public.”

The subversive thing to do would be to start a write-in campaign to get Plainsong selected.  There’s no place on the online form for people to list their own choices, so I guess the best way would be to email the mayor at .

I omitted at least one regional literary conference in last week’s roundup (and I’m sure there are more): The Jackson Hole Writers Conference will be held from June 25 through 28 and will feature Tony Earley, Julia Glass, Chris Crutcher, Ravi Shankar, and Craig Johnson, among others.

Speaking of Craig Johnson, there was a weird profile of the Wyoming writer in the New York Times this week.  The article begins from the angle of real estate, describing the wooden cabin Johnson and his wife built near Ucross.  Then Joyce Wadler delves into Johnson’s background--Johnson’s writing bio mentions that he was once a police officer in New York City.  When Wadler found no record of Johnson’s service with the NYPD, she questioned him about it.  Wadler writes:

“Responding to questions about these discrepancies by e-mail, Mr. Johnson at first ignores the issue of what he did in the 25th and 23rd Precincts and suggests dropping any reference to his law enforcement career. In later e-mails and one long conversation, he explains that he took classes in the New York City police stations that were ‘civil service oriented and was constantly recruited by the police department,’ but that after a knee injury he chose to work as a special officer attached to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since he ‘carried a gun and had a badge, and all my paraphernalia had the logo of the N.Y.P.D.,’ Mr. Johnson says, he was ‘under the impression it was a detachment of the N.Y.P.D.’ His work at the 25th and 23rd Precincts, he says finally, was for community services and the Police Athletic League. “I had no intention of misleading anyone,” he says.”

This “discrepancy” doesn’t seem that grave to me, but journalists for the New York Times probably feel a lot of pressure to question people’s biographies after the paper has had so many screw-ups of this nature.  Wadler noted that he responded “petulantly” to her inquiries.

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