A COMMUNITY READ-TOGETHER
by Marylaine Block
I have a suggestion for your next community-wide read. It's called The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived: How characters of fiction, myth, legends, television and movies have shaped our society, changed our behavior, and set the course of history..
I recommend it not because it's a great book, but because it's a fabulous idea, one that will start hundreds of conversations and arguments.
Certainly the book itself, however well it makes the case for its top 101, presents many grounds for argument. You don't need to be told, for instance, that the authors (Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan, and Jeremy Salter) are male. That's obvious from the fact that the book does not include Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester (the salvation of countless bright but plain young women), or Heathcliff (the original dark, brooding, mysterious hero who has prompted so many young women to make disastrous romantic choices), or Stephen King's Carrie (whose revenge must thrill every despised and persecuted high school girl). And where, pray tell, are Thelma and Louise?
All of us will have our favorite characters, be they human, animal, or machine, and none of our lists will be identical. There will be impassioned demands to include Charlie Brown, or Pogo ("We have met the enemy and he is us"), or the Terminator, or maybe Dr. Seuss' Horton (who meant what he said and said what he meant because "An elephant's faithful one hundred percent").
But what matters far more than the arguments is that they force us to recognize the power of the human imagination: to answer the question WHY, to help us understand human needs and behavior, to enlarge our sense of possibilities, to change our ideas of how the world works and how to live justly in a multitude of possible worlds.
And the natural home of that human imagination is our libraries.
Think for a moment of the programming possibilities (I'd want to have separate ones for children, teens, and adults). Your public discussion might begin on your website or weblogs, where all library staff could present and defend their choices, culminating with a librarians' top 100 list. The comments section would, of course, be open to the public, which you could use to collate your users' top 100.
Those lists would become an opportunity for you to show off the featured selections available in your existing collection, and a chance to purchase titles that you don't own. You could put out a revolving display of the most frequently mentioned books, videos, graphic novels, children's stories, and audiobooks, and keep refreshing it as the items circulate.
You could get even more media attention than usual by inviting local newspapers and TV stations to not only publicize the contest but propose their own top 100. You might approach local ministers and rabbis, as well, because this topic would make wonderful fodder for sermons.
You could poll members of Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce, and local political parties, because surely there are fictional characters who have inspired them and changed their worlds (don't you think some of them would be indignant that the book didn't mention architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead?).
Perhaps your art museum might like to invite people to draw, paint, sculpt, or make videos of, their most influential characters. Local media specialists could join in the event, leading schoolwide discussions, writing assignments and art assignments, and sponsoring exhibits of the children's work and the books and media that inspired their choices.
You could sponsor essay contests, for children, teens, and adults, and invite the top finishers to speak about their favorite characters at special events. You might invite the book's authors to come speak, or the mayor, city council members, and local legislators. You could ask local history teachers to speak about mythical and fictional characters who affected the course of history, and film professors to speak about influential characters from movies and TV. (You might want to record and podcast all events as well, and make them available as circulating DVDs.)
Most fun of all, you could throw costume parties for each age level, inviting people to dress up as their favorite characters. Picture it: at the children's party, Wilburs and Harry Potters and Cinderellas and cats in hats mingling while playing games and munching goodies; King Kongs and Don Juans flirting in vain with Nancy Drews and Hester Prynnes at the adult party, while Luke Skywalker squares off with Darth Vader, and William Tell and Robin Hood compete for archery honors (while Betty Crocker feeds them, and Mr. Clean snatches away the dirty plates).
Wouldn't this be a terrific way to bring the community together and get them talking? With the library at the heart of the conversation?
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COOL QUOTE:
The library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to the shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.
Terry Pratchett. Soul Music.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2006.
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