In a departure, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is asking all of us for our choices for this year’s One Book, One Denver program. At the program’s website, , he offers some possibilities. We asked some of our favorite “book folks” for their choices.
If the purpose of One Book, One Denver is to unite us in a group hug of optimism and kinship, Edgar Allen Poe is probably not the guy to do it.
Unflinching in his depiction of the macabre, Poe churned out work that flipped the mirror on our darkest fears. In the process, he invented the mystery genre, mastered the art of the short story and influenced everyone from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Stephen King. But if we hew closer to One Book’s larger mission — to build community and encourage reading — there’s no better selection than “The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe.”
Poe died a grim, mysterious death in Baltimore at the age of 40. What better way to mark 150 years since that demise than by celebrating the genius of his writing? His dazzling richness, intelligence and accessibility make him an obvious choice. (That, and he’s often wickedly fun.)
John Wenzel, The Denver Post
My reaction to this list is that there’s something on it not to offend everyone. It’s balanced with regard to men and women and racially diverse, though there aren’t many books reflecting the true ethnic diversity of America. That is to say, the list is politically correct — not a good thing. It looks a little like a standard “great books” reading list: safe, predictable, unexciting.
Given the lack of public participation in previous One Book campaigns, it would have been nice to see the mayor take more chances and, as usual, there’s a paucity of Colorado writers on the list. How refreshing it would be if he’d just take the plunge one year and name, if not Kent Haruf, then Joanne Greenberg or John Williams as the One Book candidate. Ah, well.
Of those listed, my favorite would be Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia,” which, in addition to being a wonderful portrait of life on the frontier, may have more relevance to Colorado readers than some of the others listed.
The same could be true of Louise Erdrich’s wonderful “Love Medicine,” which is set on a Midwestern Indian reservation and is beautifully written. Finally, though Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” has nothing to do with the Midwest or Colorado, it has a terrific period feel that has interested readers as diverse as Martin Scorsese (who made the film version) and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
David Milofsky, book columnist
“The Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” What a great idea to consider a collection of poems instead of the usual novel for the Denver community to read together. And no poet is more appealing than Emily Dickinson to guide the city through this diversion.
A book of poems goes well with summer, when the subject matter of readers lightens up and attention spans are winnowed by competing activities. Poetry, especially Dickinson’s shorter takes, can be consumed and truly considered in chunks. Read a poem, take a dip, repeat.
Dickinson, who died in 1886, is an eternal charmer; an unpretentious and organic writer whose appeal spans the generations. Kids love her sense of discovery. Adults read her and see the world new. Imagine a One Book title that has entire Denver families — tucked into their West Wash Park bungalows, sprawled out on lounge chairs in their grassy Mayfair backyards, gathered for family picnics at Sunken Gardens park — passing the book around, taking turns reading Dickinson’s poems aloud: quality time shared.
Dickinson can seem self-indulgent, unimportant. Any collection of her work is sure to bounce from small insight to small insight, rather than taking on the deep themes many of the swell competitors on the book list promise. But she is always a delight. She invites everyone to read.
Ray Rinaldi, The Denver Post
It’s an interesting step the mayor’s office is taking, turning the selection of the next One Book, One Denver pick over to the public. Measureable participation in the program has declined steadily since its inception; perhaps turning the selection over to popular vote will reignite interest.
I’m no longer sure what the program is supposed to be. When Leif Enger’s “Peace Like a River” was selected for the program debut, I thought the program might find its focus in our Western heritage, be it geographical, historical or cultural.
I’m torn by the list presented by the mayor’s office. My personal favorite is Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” relevant because, after all, war always is. His voice is hypnotic, the work compulsively readable. But to burrow deeper into the things that make Denver and the West unique, I’d pick either “My Ántonia,” by Willa Cather or “Bless Me, Ultima,” the often-challenged staple of high school curricula written by Rudolfo Anaya.
Conspicuously missing from the list, though, and the work I would pick as quintessentially Western and reflective of the Colorado experience is “Plainsong,” by Colorado resident Kent Haruf. Nominated for the National Book Award in 1999, it is an achingly lovely work. The characters are unforgettable, the writing insightful and easily read. And though it is a work set in rural Colorado, it is a book about moral choices, a subject that transcends location. It’s a One Book, One Denver pick that, in my mind, is long overdue.
Robin A. Vidimos, book reviewer
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is that most American of authors: Fascinated by endemic lore, enraptured by the splendor of the North American landscape, patriotic in his belief that good wins (but not blind to the shortcomings and hypocrisies of his contemporary American culture), unassailably artistic, dedicated to the elevation of New World English language — and just a little bit wacky.
He produced work that’s sophisticated enough to appeal to the scholars, but accessible enough for the rest of us to simply get lost in for an afternoon. Though sometimes he’s filed with the Romanticism school, I’d call Longfellow more of an experimenter than that; he bucked critical trends — and risked lower sales figures — to employ unusual and unfamiliar meters (dactylic hexameter anyone?) and language. He never underestimated his audience’s patience and willingness to go out on a limb.
“What a writer asks of his reader,” he famously said, “is not so much to like, but to listen.” Inspired by, but also an inspirer of, his close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as other contemporaries like Emerson, Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow had a place at the head table with the rest of the American literary elite during his lifetime; and no writer was a more tireless champion of America’s richness of physical, and folkloric, beauty.
Take the sprawling, melodramatic, exquisite “Evangeline,” perhaps his most widely read poem (at least during Longfellow’s lifetime, 1807-1882). It starts, albeit, in Canada (Nova Scotia, to be exact, just across the bay from his birth state of Maine) but the action quickly moves to the then-American West: The Mississippi River, the bayous of Louisiana, the Ozarks and the “boundless prairie” beyond. Unafraid to go over the top, he painted an idyllic, but challenging, landscape that, while it doesn’t specifically describe Colorado (which he never saw), certainly sounds familiar. The colors, smells, activity and pulse of the landscape are alive here, palpable and infinite and profound. It’s not Colorado, but I can’t help wondering what Longfellow could have produced, if only he’d laid his own eyes on the real thing.
A book that wasn’t nominated but should have been: “The Human Comedy,” by William Saroyan.
Tucker Shaw, The Denver Post
Truth: When it comes to reading, sometimes I need to be told what to do.
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” has been languishing on the bedside table now for going on five years, and it is time someone compelled me to read it.
I know that it was among the most controversial black novels of the 20th century — Hurston was excoriated for its voice, for dialogue written in black vernacular style and for its failure to convey the difficulty of life for blacks in the American South in the 1930s.
Richard Wright, whose “Native Son” was published in 1940, likened Hurston’s 1937 work to a minstrel show. I know that the journey of self- discovery, plotted in lyrical detail and rooted in black folk tradition, would become one of the most influential feminist novels of the 20th century, its publication revived in the 1970s by Alice Walker, then a literature teacher at Wellesley College.
And now I am ready to fully understand how this slim volume, a story of great love and growth and sacrifice, could have such enormous and enduring influence.
Dana Coffield, The Denver Post
Jack London’s 1903 classic, “Call of the Wild,” may be a young readers’ tale, but its harsh exploration of the primitive instincts of animal and man are hardly juvenile. “Call” cries across the decades to me today as powerfully as it did when I read it as a child.
This is the tale of Buck, a dog who has been stolen from kind owners to be sold and worked in the Klondike gold rush. Buck quickly learns the law of fang and claw, and life lessons have brutal consequences for creatures two- legged and four.
Reading about life in harsher times helps put modern problems in perspective, not to mention remind us of the baser instincts we aren’t so far removed from.
Plus it’s a dog tale, and who can’t relate a canine story of their own? Well, Westminster author David Wroblewski can. His epic, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” leaps and bounds with insight and beautiful prose. He was good enough for Oprah’s list; why not the mayor’s?
John Ealy, The Denver Post
Let’s get this out of the way right off the top: It’s simply wrong, Mr. Mayor, not to allow us to vote for Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong.” You’ve heard the arguments before. It’s set in Colorado, written (beautifully) by a Colorado author. And it has a wonderful message that there are many ways to define what constitutes a family.
That said, there is nothing wrong with the choices we did get. Most, if not all, are considered great works and we can all gain something from reading any of them. But there is one that stands out, that reaches inside you, tears at you and leaves you emotionally spent. It’s Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel, “The Things They Carried.”
There have been many books about that war, both fiction and nonfiction, that have rightfully received acclaim. Michael Herr’s “Dispatches”; “A Bright and Shining Lie,” by Neil Sheehan; and Philip Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” all jump to mind. O’Brien’s own “Going After Cacciato” won the National Book Award in 1979.
None of them, as good as they are, can touch “The Things They Carried” for sheer power and writerly virtuosity.
Using a collection of often interlocking and sometimes repetitive stories, O’Brien gets to the emotional core of a generation of young men who faced their own demons on a battlefield half a world away in an increasingly unpopular and horror-filled war.
The stories tell of childhoods and of growing up too quickly. They tell of war, with its periods of overwhelming boredom mixed with total, unrelenting terror. They tell of reliving that war two decades after its end.
“The Things They Carried” is not a comforting read. It is, though, simply one of the best pieces of writing about war and how it affects the people caught up in it that has ever come down the pike.
Tom Walker, The Denver Post
Here are the books available to choose from for this year’s One Book, One Denver:
A Farewell to Arms
A Lesson Before Dying
A Wizard of Earthsea
Bless Me, Ultima
Fahrenheit 451
Housekeeping
Love Medicine
My Ántonia
Sun, Stone and Shadows
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Age of Innocence
The Call of the Wild
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Joy Luck Club
The Poetry of Emily Dickenson
The Poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
The Shawl
The Stories and Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe
The Thief and the Dogs
The Things They Carried
Their Eyes Were Watching God
To Kill a Mockingbird
Washington Square
Vote: Choose the book you’d like the city to read
Discuss: Tell us what you think
