One City One Book

One City One Book (also One Book One City, [City] Reads, On the Same Page and other variations) is a generic name for a community reading program that attempts to get everyone in a city to read and discuss the same book. The name of the program is often reversed to One Book One City, or is customized to name the city where it occurs. Popular book picks have been Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima.

One City One Book programs take the idea of a localized book discussion club and expand it to cover a whole city. The first such program was "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book" in 1998, started by Nancy Pearl at Seattle Public Library's Washington Center for the Book. The book chosen for the program was 'The Sweet Hereafter' by Russell Banks, written in 1991. Other cities copied the idea, and the Library of Congress listed 404 programs occurring in 2007.

Each city's program has its own goals; these typically include building a sense of community and promoting literacy. Nancy Pearl warns against expecting too much from a program: "Keep in mind that this is a library program, it's not an exercise in civics, it's not intended to have literature cure the racial divide. This is about a work of literature."

Programs typically involve more than having everyone read the same book. Some other activities that have been included are: book discussion sessions, scholarly lectures on the book or related topics, a visit by the author, exhibits, related arts programming (especially showing a movie of the book if there is one), and integration into school curricula. In Boston the "One City One Story" program used shorter stories and distributed tens of thousands of free copies of the story over the course of a month.

American Library Association puts out a detailed step-by-step guide on how to organize a local program, including the critical step of picking the one book. The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress tracks all known programs and the books they have used.

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