I’m happy to report that I currently have a reading gig scheduled for 7 P.M., Thursday, May 27th at my local bookstore: Readers’ Books.
After I secured the date, I took a copy of Pearls My Mother Wore and a copy of my press release to Two of the local newspapers: The Sonoma Index Tribune, The Sonoma Sun (or Sol in Spanish.) With all the moxie I could muster, I entered the news offices and announced that I was newsworthy. The receptionists were amused and took my info. It’s too soon to hear back; this I started telling myself the moment I left their offices. It’s not that I’m not newsworthy, it’s just that it’s too soon, right? Right.
I took other nervy actions on behalf of the novel this week. I petitioned Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco for an endorsement. Google them if you don’t know about their amazing inclusion policy. I also sent review requests to The San Francisco Chronicle and The Oregonian.
Can I just say how proud I am of myself. This asking for recognition stuff taint easy.
‘Taint.’ Can you tell I have been reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer? It’s our local selection for The Big Read. The Big Read is a program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts since 2006. It’s intended to combat the decline in literary reading among students and adults as well as to promote reading for personal enrichment.
I hadn’t read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I do, in fact, feel enriched having done so. Tom Sawyer is credited as being the first truly American novel, written in distinctly American vernacular, with distinctly American characters. Originally published in 1876, it unapologetically flouts the high-tone literary conventions of Europe by portraying a simple society with complex motives.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, but it’s a hard sell to my guys at Hanna Boys Center. They find it excruciatingly “boring.” Its linguistic flourishes are flowery, sophisticated, slangy, preachy, convoluted, and exceedingly difficult to follow without a lot of life experience. Even though it’s a story about boys, I don’t think it’s necessarily for them. I’m charmed by Twain’s characters, but I’m almost fifty years old. I don’t think boys today find boys from another era charming. I have to do a lot of talking to get them to see where the personality traits of old are just the same today. The trickster, the braggart, the town drunk, the doddering aunt, the simpleton, they all still exist.
I hate to think that this book is doing more to deter kids from reading than help, but I suspect it is. It’s my long-held opinion that reading is an entertainment only when the reader connects with the story. If that doesn’t happen, then reading is torture; they might as well be reading the Health Care Bill, or tax code. Handing some kids The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and telling them to read it, is like handing toddlers the keys to a Ferrari and telling them to drive it. It’s not gonna happen, and someone could be hurt in the process. Literary overwhelm gets kids to start repeating over and over, “I hate to read.” It did me.
How I broke out of that is nothing short of a miracle.
Thinking of you, and I’ll post again next Friday.
Let me know what you think, how’s it going, what’s up, what ya readin’, what ya writin’, it’s all good.