Imagine a whole city reading the same book at the same time, then getting together at libraries and museums, in local community centers and suburban living rooms, to talk about it. In a civic experiment that has blossomed into a national trend in the past couple of years, Americans from Seattle to Washington, D.C. are doing just that -- and attributing all sorts of social benefits to the experience.
Not only does it lure people from their televisions and computer games, city officials say, it promotes literacy, encourages interest in literature and pulls diverse communities together. Last fall, Chicagoans in their tens of thousands read Ms. Harper Lee's 1960 novel about Southern bigotry, "To Kill a Mockingbird." The initiative was deemed such a success that this spring the city will read Mr. Elie Wiesel's autobiographical Holocaust novel, "Night." New Yorkers, after some characteristic squabbling, are set to read Mr. Chang-rae Lee's Korean-American spy novel, "Native Speaker," and Washingtonians will choose next month from a list that includes Plato's "Apology" and Mr. W.E.B. Du Bois' "The Souls of Black Folk" -- fascinating options indeed for such a socially and racially divided city.
From the perspective of socially and racially homogeneous Japan, of course, the idea looks rather different, and at first glance less appealing. Graduates of the Japanese education system, in which entire grades nationwide read the same book at the same time, would hardly be excited by the idea of joining city-size book fests as adults. The challenge in this country is not to encourage group thinking, but to promote a sense of individual differences, to foster not greater cohesion but greater tolerance of diversity. Surely the ideal to strive for is people thinking for themselves and choosing their own books rather than simply reading what a local government committee suggests they read.