Each winter, the public submits suggestions for next year’s book. In January, a panel of community members reviews the suggestions, narrowing that list down to 10 titles, and then chooses two or three books to present for a public vote.
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Read more about “The Air We Breathe” and “Unaccustomed Earth.”
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The One Read Reading Panel has selected “The Air We Breathe” by Andrea Barrett and “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri as this year’s choices for the One Read vote. Voting begins March 30 and continues through April 17.
Vote at: oneread.dbrl.org
Voting for our 2009 title begins March 30.
The Daniel Boone Regional Library has completed taking suggestions from the public for what one book the community should read for One Read 2009. The One Read Reading Panel is now narrowing that list down to two or three titles for a public vote this spring.
(from the author, originally published by Powell’s Books)
“Can’t cook, but doesn’t bite.” It is only the line atop a classified advertisement in a weekly newspaper, that of “an A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition” seeking to relocate to Montana early in the twentieth century. But for young Paul Milliron, his two younger brothers and his widower father, and his rambunctious fellow students in their one-room school, it spells abracadabra.
Paul is the voice of the book: a bit wry, contemplative, and literally bedeviled by dreams — lifelong, he has had the disturbing knack of vividly recalling the episodes of imagination that swirl in his mind at night. Paul has risen to become the state superintendent of education, and at the vantage point of 1957, strapped for budget in what he knows is going to be a changed world of education because of the Soviet landing of Sputnik, he is facing what is more like a nightmare, everything he has believed in is “eclipsed by this Russian kettle of gadgetry orbiting overhead.” In his heart he knows the powerful political pressures on him to “consolidate” the rural one-room schools, which will be the death knell of those perky idiosyncratic little institutions such as the one that produced him at Marias Coulee.
Before his crucial convocation of rural educators to give them his decision, though, he impulsively drives out to Marias Coulee, now a scatter of mostly abandoned homesteads just beyond the northern fringe of a successful irrigation project. There the story begins, with Paul swept back in memory to 1910 when the Milliron family’s hard-bargained new housekeeper, Rose Llewelynn, and her unannounced brother step down from the train, “bringing several kinds of education to the waiting four of us.”
Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, growing up the only child to his ranch hand father and ranch cook mother, living along the Rocky Mountain Front where much of his writing takes place. Doig knew he wanted to be a writer his junior year of high school. His first book, “This House of Sky,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1979. Doig is a former ranch hand, newspaperman and magazine editor. He is a graduate of Northwestern, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism and he also holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle with his wife Carol.
My narrator in “The Whistling Season,” Paul Milliron, educator and bookman and graduate of a one-room school that he was, would have fully known the value of a community read, all the way from its linguistic beginnings. “Communitas,” the root of our usage of “community”—in Paul’s well-thumbed Latin-to-English dictionary, these several meanings of “communitas” are given: “sharing, partnership, social ties, fellowship, togetherness.” What better rewards could readers and writer alike ask for, than the common ground of literary fellowship through reading?
Regards, Ivan Doig
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