Reading List, Upgraded: Libraries Embark on Winter Reading Challenge, With a Twist

The Ocean County Library system is aiming to engage readers in communities all over the county this winter with its own take on a national initiative.

The Big Read, a nationwide program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, has a simple aim: get people to pick up a good book.

The project was piloted in 2006, following an NEA study that found literary reading in American was in a rapid and accelerating decline, according to the NEA’s own website for the project. 

That first year, four books were featured in 10 communities. By last summer, more than 800 grants were awarded to communities all over the country to begin their own Big Read programs.

The books offered as suggestions fall into a wide range of genres. There are 20th century American classics, like Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, that many readers might not have picked up since high school lit class.

There are also more recent favorites, like Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club.

All are on prominent display in the local branches, available to anyone with a library card.

Many of the picks are books that people have likely read in the past, said Carol Zsiga, a librarian and one of the co-chairs of the Ocean County Library’s Readers Services Committee.

But these are titles “that maybe if they wanted to go back, they’d see new insights if they read it at another time,” she said.

The Ocean County library has taken the NEA’s program a step further.

Members of Zsiga’s committee have taken five of The Big Read’s suggested books and drawn up “reading maps” with follow-up materials for each one.

Love Willa Cather’s My Antonia, the 1918 masterpiece about life and love on the prairie? The committee suggests picking up Conrad Richter’s Sea of Grass, a story of a woman’s relationship to her family in the American ranching west.

“We came up with the idea of the book leading you to other places,” Zsiga said. And the “leads” offered aren’t just for other novels.

“We also wanted you to look at some of the other aspects of the collection,” she said, and explore various resources the library offers: film, media, music and even internet databases.

The challenge continues until early March, when many libraries – including the Barnegat Branch – will hold an informal book café to allow readers to talk about the books they enjoyed and share ideas about other titles and resources.

“Even those who didn’t participate but were interested and might like to know the books that are out there are welcome,” said Barnegat Branch manager Gigi Hayes.

Zsiga said the point of the whole program is not about checking off books on a list of must-reads, but about having fun and loving literature.

“One of the great things about reading is that it takes you somewhere else,” she said. “It lets you see what it’s like to live as another person, in another time, another location…there are lots of things you can do.”

The Ocean County Library picks:

• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
• My Antonia, by Willa Cather
• The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
• A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gains