Kansas Notables Books, Part Two & The Great American Read

i found the first crime on a cold january nine twenty thirteen led light eyes on her deception <unk> fields of the shimmy black diamonds jump into the chest deep water to retrieve the ball and threw out a runner at home trying to score from first days the streets in town were named after states and order when they've been added to the union it seemed that the trail to clap when the tornado came in swept you away as you knew all along it would it was not to drop you into some technicolor fantasy today aren't apr presents works books and more books i'm kate mcintyre and today i'm katie are present or two thousand at kansas notable books are two each year the state library of kansas selects the best new books by kansans or about kansas we'll hear from several of the kansas know bothers on today's program we'll also learn about public television's the great american read the search for america's one hundred best loved novels and how you can participate that's in the second half of today's k pr prisons if you missed my previous k pr

presents kansas notable books are one featuring interviews with many of this year's cancer snob authors you can find it on our website kansas public radio dot org under news slash k pr prisons a kansas known authors were honored september eighth at the kansas book festival in topeka while at the book festival i had a chance to visit with some of the other kansas known authors including mark everly of haiti's here's kansas notable book is kansas based all eighteen fifty eight to nineteen forty one eighteen fifty eight was the first record we have the newspapers of the world baseball being mentioned in the state and so was an organized game it was just some people are playing in emporia on christmas day and so that was kind of the reason for the beginning and then nineteen forty one was of course you're the world war two began and so although the wpa projects that were building baseball

stadiums and all the players were being diverted to other things and so there was kind of a wall and baseball activity except for some company and military teams were playing to kind of have something to do during her long days of training and work in the factories and those sorts of things those kind of allies break point and then everything changed after or too because before that everything was segregated after world war two jackie robinson it came on the scene and then so baseball became an integrated game gradually didn't happen overnight and so's discover my season brick point your friend several books before many about fix the mobile world has been trying to find a bit of a departure for me by your interest in baseball it's it is a little bit but the two things are different is something in the summer outside that's for sure baseball right now can undo football you're going to go pheasant hunting you're going to go fishing and so there is some connection i guess between us and so baseball says most sports

you just it's something that people grow up with sometimes in the summer's bonnaroo runs a baseball fan but it's one of those kinds of activities that if you get it when you're a little kid it just never really reach you jude you never really quite grow right although the major league teams they're not populated by mendoza those of the boys of summer not the men of summery kind of thing so baseball historian dorothy seymour described your book as being a design lead thorough spoke to me next it's the body part is a lot of baseball histories don't have a lot of documentation so there are a lot of myths floating around and so i probably got a little paranoid hand the book is like one quarter of years every place i got my information kind of documentation but and it's not that i went into this kind of tailored to tear down this caused mr fine but sometimes mr believe this fact and so i just want to say enjoy it is a myth that don't take this

track getting back to your dizzyingly their of research and how did you go about researching baseball for the most of it comes from contemporary newspapers and not relying too much on second resources and this was just kind of a comeback that background sort of statement that we just reading all that many many every town have multiple newspapers it seems like it's a poem and so sometimes they competed for how they would describe events in their community including baseball games and so there is a lot of information in there and that the towns are using their teams that as a means of boosting themselves they were competing against nearby towns for yahoo is going to dominate who's gonna be the county seat and then maintain that and so there was a lot of talk about baseball all those newspapers and so provided a lot of interesting information and not written by sportswriter so some of the descriptions are more nervous wondering what would happen if i were to write a baseball story of fact you know one

of the things i found really interesting about your book was the extent to wage baseball really shaped the social life in a lot of kansas towns or how the socialite was really it really revolved around baseball it did because in this era radio was just starting to come in the resort is in a tv no computers or people in the vehicle's other than that those drawn by horses are powered by steam and so it was everybody kind of got there on foot maybe a horse wagon or something of that nature and so it was just the way when you have those longer days so you spend you know that that was in a forty hour workweek back then either sixty six days a week you had maybe ten hours of work but now he had that extra sunlight and so as a chance to be outside socializing with everybody else in the community even if you're living on a farm you came into town and so it was just something that but slow down and hang out in the

grandstand more somebody play baseball or those sorts of things those almost like at a county fair you can do it every week or even several times a week he really delve into how baseball teams really formed around racial and ethnic divisions and how much that played into those communities really having something to be proud of and rallied around unsold a lot of the smaller towns you know had actually integrated teams vote counting it was a professional one and so they're willing to forgo the segregation that might've occurred elsewhere in the community but to do it if you want a basketball team and it didn't matter after that and so but in the city's got larger than the segregation became a little more rigid calm but each of those communities within the larger city you know because those were the people interacting with each other on a regular basis anyway so scarlet town within a town and so a lot of those those teams were

still representing a community of bushes part of the larger city about half a year but kansas baseball is about the baseball teams and baseball players but then you switch gears pretty drastically and talk about the baseball stadiums themselves yeah that was actually this whole thing was a big accident and so i was just i like to go visit all places i've i'm a biologist but i have a passion for history but on most people to the division have to go to the place where the history happen to really kind of immerse yourself a little bit more and so kind of them merging those two i went to baseball parks and was just kind of curious and stoller were the oldest one is in the state because you're about boston's fenway park and anne chicago's wrigley field being the oldest ones in the major leagues cyclist kansas have and so i just kind of started looking into it for fun and then as i started talking to people they kept asking other questions and answer those questions and so it just kind of

snowballed eventually and so my hope was is in part that i mean if i can tell the story of the people at the front end of the book and then kind of tell the story of these places where you can still experience something that the people that live there in the nineteen twenties or eighteen nineties might have experienced in that same place that it would give those communities those few that still have those really old baseball parks are recent to conserve it the same way they might can serve an old historical church or historical business building or something of that nature in your research did you discover a favorite baseball stand alone and in trouble when i started there were the rich can go before world war two hour one of those was torn down was working on the book that won independence kansas and the one in wichita is now slated for demolition this win or so will be down to eight that were built before world war ii borg or two but out of those they're all they're

all really nice and so the trees have done a good job of of continuing to use them for bush was to be used for baseball and then even some other activities of birds janszen says welfare reform why is that because it has all the elements i like in a baseball park is it's got natives stone on the outside which is a kind of a nice character i cover a permanent sort of look the old ballparks world sometimes it's all wood and it burned down enough to build every five or ten years because they don't want to burn down so this gives it a look of permanence but once you get on the inside the seeding is all still work it's got a wooden roof over the top and so it's and they've done a really nice job of restoring her years ago and so it's just it's got that look a permanence but still got the old time fuel than a baseball park should have issues going there for baseball a lot of the modern ballparks are porous much sports bar is there a baseball park and so if you

just really want to watch baseball that's the kind of park i would go to that's a favorite team or a player or episode that you learned about why you're researching a book there's a lot of it was just inched announcements that there was like that outstanding person caught people think of the famous people that maybe were born in kansas to play baseball walter johnson for merck for example from down southeast kansas is one of the best pitchers ever won the first five people chosen for the baseball hall of fame in new york but there's a sudden or some other players but it was the fact that there were everybody was doing and so did it wasn't so much a single person but communities were doing at the time didn't really fully appreciate going into than i was used to just thinking in terms of individual people maybe even just an individual to sign everywhere towns that don't exist anymore had a baseball team back then and so that how pervasive it was bitter all these

communities during the summers was was the thing that i really enjoyed most was just reading all and the perseverance that people played some people just women in particular is the one area where we haven't fully integrated yet maybe someday but women's teams weren't for the abuse worse than any others they just they were scoffed at in the news media there were scoffed at a bar locals and so for any of them to go out play baseball did they really have to want to do that and so their perseverance and in the face of all that criticism i always kind of respected and is true for other groups as well but women probably more so than the rest you read an excerpt from your book date and so this is kind of going back to a baseball parks right the whole thing started this process and we kind of have a view now all these nice contain parks with big fences so you have to pay to get in and see but the baseball parks were not always quite so standardize in that question

so this is about a couple of incidents that occurred in a shootout in southeastern kansas the absence of an outfield fence and constraining ground rules that many early baseball grounds meant the homerun can be achieved on a better speech around the bases or perhaps one will hit ball weren't rolling into a cornfield and shoot with one man on base cloud spotter drove the ball into the off africa between deep center and right spot for a romp around the bases for all he was worth going after denting the pan walked over to the bench with a broad smile expecting to receive congratulations instead manager or summers' remarks that did not look like a bunt to me you're find the price of a smoke for not sacrificing when you were told to it was not only our fields bordered by crops that presented a challenge for a few years there was a lagoon near a baseball diamond schmidt during a game in nineteen oh four the ball was hit into the lagoon and remained him play charlie fields of the shooting of black diamonds an african american team jumped into the chest deep water

to richard retrieved the ball and throw around at home trying to score from first date that's mark everly reading from his kansas based bought eighteen fifty eight to nineteen forty one thank you so much mark into for joining us today at arby's as the two thousand eighteen kansas notable books part to each year the state library of kansas selects fifteen books as the best new books by kansas doctors or about kansas if you missed part one of my two thousand eighteen cans as notable books out it's now archived at our website kansas public radio dot org becky mandible now lives in washington state by grew up in

kansas her collection of short stories is called that camp that's i feel like it's more about bad relationships that just happened to happen in kansas than anything about kansas necessarily so yeah i think i was writing this book at a time when i was you know leaving a lot of friends and i had just entered a relationship that was really important to me in moving away from family exciting as is really thinking about the ways that people split apart or come together and how location can play into that yeah it's funny because when i was in the middle of writing letters it was a fetus and ratify how to defend my thesis a visiting professor ware went to grad school she asked me what the stories were about and i like the kind of prose that i hadn't been tasked with really coming up with anything like diane and i was is paralyzed until i realized it was a

terrible man description because it seemed to me like this one uncomfortable relationship after another weaving through all of those stories though is kansas talking about the sense of place that you evoke in your stories yeah like i said i wrote this right after moving from kansas some i started when i was actually still living in lawrence on the brink of leaving i think two or three of the stories in here i started the year after i graduated from kay oh man and then the rest i wrote when i was in graduate school in california really homesick for kansas so i think it's this is a song my mind a new zealand plays have ever known a hand yeah i was just like excessively thinking about it and talking about it with people from california and i just kind of you know when i sat down to write my stories in grad school there being i don't know where else to place them home and you have to sort of thinking about a lot

about one of your stories is about a young woman who travels from kansas out to california and steve so i'm comfortable there and at one point i am a friend she meets says oh of course you're homesick and she says no it's not that i'm homesick it's chess i'm not california and yeah that is that sense of my feeling is moving to california expertly it was so silly strange meaning how chronic southern california so obsessive california they're like oh welcome to paradise you're from kansas city leverage here and you know i talked about him those all the time to make up for new friends and they were like well you're just you're jose canseco and i was so resistant lot of like you know not that the kansas like i am in california and then i realized it wasn't just that i didn't like california thought it was missing home alive in me about the story the house on alabama street it's a story

set in lawrence and again on the tails of a failed relationship lee half ounce of that story hide its origins why not my friends in graduate school his name is jacob and i jumped at the beginning of school that you you know you tell me all these like weird stories from his life and i joked that i was going to write all my stories about him in some capacity and so he was living in this house with this woman who had just gotten divorced and shoes nill aged and you talk about shooting a corner him and talk to him late at night and i saw i just about this whole imaginary scenario in which is trying to seduce him as she was lonely so that story it's a blend of that and right before graduates caught by a poem worked in grand teton national park and i met a guy out there knows this a total summer park seasonal work playing and i just kept thinking he was like only at cannes he now in and live with you in in

california neared gratz was like that's just you know and maybe not yeah fled czarist was a blend of those situations playing out connected to read an excerpt from that story and the streets and hammer named after states and order when they've been added to the union it seemed a betrayal to clear as of the town's residents secretly dreamed of living somewhere other than kansas a desolate state of the desolate people lawrence begins elsewhere in your writing i believe that if clifford says the people here do see no use now i just heard it in that science trying to kind of embody some of the reactions to kansas but i'd been encountering in my friends in california and i think it would be hard for someone not from kansas to to come here in a nazi the magic right away so powers of sort of that i was playing with of him however stories and bad kansas like or unlike

other writing that you've done dieses talking to someone about this these stories are a lot of them haven't workshop been revised over and over and over again and really ken taylor down and a lot of rhetoric outside of these stories is i think qwerty are summoned how magical elements or they're more humor based and i get more experimental than the stories are yeah they feel very least a silver evening teddy in a way that some of my stuff outside of them doesn't talk to me about writing in the short story form ones that work for you i love short stories because you can focus on the seventh level and every word year you can just add success of our word then and endangered just the way you know a sense was into the next one am working on a novel or a

noun that it's hard because that obsession just makes everything so slow and meticulous in yeah in a short story you know you have to do it because every every census own poor and whereas in a novel you know there's so much material to work with that it's more about the no narrative drive and making sure that the whole thing's sort of sticks together whereas the story you know it's just like this tiny little delicate chocolate that you get messed with that rather than this being tiered cake tell me about the title bad kansas any fears that it's discouraging kansans from picking up the buck yeah i think a lot of people have a very strong reaction to it some people really like another group were like oh it's not like it's not about just being bad necessarily but i like i like punching a steer a friend of mine actually

came up with the lake has stuck in my head and i think is a great title makes these kids you know from the beginning these are not going to be happy little stories that are tied up with a ribbon yeah i wanted them to kind of share the experience of canvas that i'd hammer everything event you know polite and the now and it's very greedy and quirky and yes strange with that in mind and i realize that you're not responsible for the book cover me about the jacket it's so are resting in that sense is very it's very weird to iran than the us in georgia press ask me what time cover i had in mind or i had anything i was thinking of and i sent them like this along like two page explanation of like oh you know i want to be and we're going to have to do with you know the prairie in openness of kansas but how strange a strange element with it and they can't yell that on the head it wasn't what i was

imagining at all but then again i have no idea what i was so describe it for our listeners if they acted be given as cern the view from inside of a car and you're driving down a country road somewhere in kansas probably more towards the middle or western side physically flat and there's a blue sky and then there is just a very large grasshopper for clinging to the windshield and yet he's got some pretty striking and federman turn sell we speak here is really disturbing but again it captures the whole working as of this black and that kind of unsettled feel of a lot of your stories yeah i came out of the hall metaphorical explanation of someone looking out on to the prairie and then there's this like graphic disturbing thing sort of hidden them in the nose can i have you read another excerpt from your

printer but berg insists you're my mind your read from a story called ball there because the last story in the book and is carried from the beginning and this was actually one of the stories that i started when i was still living in lawrence it was understood that maxine and i were waiting for men is the dead center of july and the kansas son was poised like the face of a hammer ready to strike in the lake diaper service jellyfish style and children were painted the sunscreen as bottle caps to their ears listening for an ocean they'll likely never seen maxine and i started running sunscreen on each other there's nothing certain girl about it for the title girls anywhere but from hardy irish stock our bodies like to peel potatoes the application of sunscreen was more of a medical procedure than anything else maxine was working on my shoulders when a pair of men appeared before us

one holding up fishing pole the other hot dog we were familiar with are kind late twenty somethings who are cut offs and turn red claiming coolers filled with hands they came to the lake to drink and fish and sequences and girls and the key needs the fisherman's fire was down and he was severely sunburn on his cheeks and nose as if someone had taken a frying pan to his face the hot idea was better tallent hand with a lumberjack beard he was attractive genuinely attractive and seemed completely unaware of it how we do it is the fishermen asked sinking their teeth into either something blew into the hardline leaders aren't very winked at me perfectly fine i said half wanting them to go where i could foresee the whole thing a hotdog the air would go for maxine who isn't actively prettier and funnier than me and it stuck with the fishermen can we help you we just wanted to combine and they do a barbecue the fishermen said he took that is head for the parking lot

or a group of people are gathered around a charcoal grill i was hungry and boren had a deep love for barbecues but i wasn't about to accept an invitation from strangers luckily maxine have an inherent affection for strangers yet another quality that a human tutor she wants your love aspen with the guys or many of the class she invited me on the title or we both ended up in the ditch as it turned out the guy was related to a famous screenwriter and the three of them maxine the guy the screenwriter and the weekend drinking cognac in an outdoor hot tub sheehan even handed has anyone actually i'm starving maxine till the fishermen and begin to gather things she looked at me eyebrows raised you coming not wanting to be alone i promised my clothes and follows her to the parking lot that's becky mandelbaum reading from bad kansas becky thank you so much for joining us today to thank you kansas

public radio has a copy of bad kansas to give away as well as several other cancers notable books if you'd like a chance to win a copy go to our website kansas public radio dot org and look and there available giveaways you can also leave a comment on tape years facebook page under this week's k pr presence post my next kansas not bother is robert ray behind his collection of essays is called headlights on the prairie essays on home robert thank you for joining us today that is a measure haven't you living in indianapolis but your writing just smacks of kansas it is so i don't use the term homespun they really evokes kansas of a certain era talk to me about your sense of place and and why your stories are so rooted in kansas well i'm a part of it is that i'm not on my right i'm really not trying to project the

mythic kansas city kansas that everyone on the two coasts thinks exists i try to write about kansas rooted in detail and in an actual stories so i grew up in the city in western kansas is in a very distinct know you have are people who really stand out in my memory and in indiana for twenty years my family come back at least two times a year i come back more like four times here one common thread throughout your stories is there's a lot of tension between western kansas has home and western kansas as a place to visit well you know i i think i didn't really think much about cannes is is a place or myself as someone who's from here until i laughed and then and i've lived away from cannes is pretty much since nineteen eighty four and and i miss that a lot

but also i just found that a big part of my identity was caught up with itunes and being from kansas and specifically going out with a father who was an agriculture and farming and ranching and i'm so for being away for a long time made me realize was what kids really was all about and so as a writer you know we often say that to get the true sense of place and to really communicate to readers you need to not only be an insider to the place to have insider knowledge of the place that you need to live the way far enough and long enough that you develop kind of an outsider's view of it you begin to see what's unique and interesting about it because you know how it differs from other places one of my favorite stories in your collection headlights on the prairie is one in which you talk about a bully in junior

high who sets his sights on new and we figure out how deep how to deal with that can you talk to me about that story yes so it's a kind of it's a i guess it falls into a particular genre is a bully story but also a story about being new to a place so when i was in school i went to catholic school grades one through eight and at that time the junior high was seventy eight and nine so all those who would covered school we went through eighth grade and then for one year we went to the junior high and just kind of messed up the whole chemistry for one year then the next year all this one of the high school so there was a lot of tension and there was a lot of i guess i'm bumping of horns and the story you're talking about i'd challenge by the boy yeah someone who is the toughest killer is the fire coming from sega heart and some would say it was me and so he got my name any foul have figured this figure this thing out so i was really really surprised but i'm glad you

feel like it's full of a lot of tension because you know it is a story about a fight only one conscious of an entire store i remember those junior high days and my own jr high hat apparently girls who were twins who the school would probably once every three months just be shaken by these rumors that the leonard cohen's had set their sights on someone and someone is going to get beat up i don't know that actually ever happened but that kind of fight for territory that's it seems like it's a universal thing about aids year twice the trouble it's a terrible in times to know robert you read from one of her stories yeah sure i'll read just a little bit from the first chapter in this isn't as the shore is chapter in the book and it's our mother gets a representative chapter because most of the chapters have a law dramatization a love scene but in this chapter i i focus a lot more on feeding some of the themes of the book to this

chapter is called why i hate the wizard of oz imagine having the land of your birth a place about which you have complex and wildly ambivalent feelings reduced to a black and white cartoon someone asks you where you're from and when you reply kansas this well meaning strangers grins and blurts out where's todo o that's right we're not in kansas anymore you get this in new york indiana california even as far afield as paris france get cans that's how we gain much chance how to say that you hailed from a place and inhabited by ten men in sweet little girl's and passports and demanding starkly beautiful place with twenty mile view sunflower is as big as your head and night skies so clear you might believe

yourself to have been born among the stars where the wind blows without seats and flies by like vampires and the state of the slaughterhouse overhangs everything like a toxic cloud where it's not unusual for a kid like you to receive use for a shotgun at ten driver we track at twelve and solo in a beechcraft debonair at forty or fifty does that sound like oz you want to ask that you know why bother when the tornado came in swept you away as you knew all along it would it was not to drop you into some technicolor fantasy rather into the same world of applebee's and best buy the jokes tears inhabit that's the context here that's the reason you refuse to join dorothy stay in cover that's robert ray burton reading from his book had lights

on the prairie and faith on home wrecker what the things i love about your writing is it seems deceptively simple it's very you have a very straightforward writing style and it's easy to read your stories and think i could've written that and yet you capture this sense of place and that time in your life so beautifully and so effortlessly perhaps it's not so effortless well i have to say you know writing is a mixture and really hard work and butter but there's a lot of joy involvement to have to say that i haven't enjoyed writing everything that i've written i had a novel that was never published that i did five drafts of the makeover course of four years has to learn how to write a novel these essays were a lot of fun a lot of fun to write i took my time with and i yeah i tried to have as much fun as i could with

them and then you know the parts that were harder with things have to be cut or try and i've been writing on earth now just come to accept that this is part of the deal you're not just a writer you teach writing at it you pee you why would you try to teach your students about writing it's a great question what it takes a lot of different writing classes but the main one that i teach both the graduate and undergraduate loans creative nonfiction writing science memoir writing just mom my book is a memoir is a memoir and essays i think and it does not teach well things are things that we really focus on this idea we think about your lives lives are lived in months or years or decades and they're certainly not remembered that way their lives are remembered in moments and so an end with the first things we do in my class i asked students to write down

fifteen moments that they remember from their life not don't try to interpret and don't try to say why i don't have but just a moment you remember vividly right now and then later we start working on on telling the story of that moment and so you have lots of the prairie also the ss came out of this this arm exercises that there's an essay in here about a really terrible race track record i saw the hutchison fair in nineteen seventy four and it in a in the rack i saw a man stand up on top of his car and he was on fire and his hands were held out from inside in this kind of christ like pose and he fell to the ground and another man a man came in a rough a towel around callanan and put the fire out that image was kind of seared into my brain but the essay is more a telling of the whole story of how that moment came to be

and this is where you find the material that has impacted you most and then the real work is how do you translate that so that also can have an impact on readers robert thank you so much for listening with me and i thank you so much for inviting me kansas public radio has a happy i've had lights on the prairie that kansas and several other cancers notable books if you'd like a chance to win a copy go to our web site kansas public radio dot org look under extras and then are available giveaways you can also leave a comment on kbr is facebook page under this week's k pr presence post coming up it's the great american reid right after this you are listening to take your presents on kansas public radio from the university of kansas we are ninety one five lawrence and ninety point three senate were mining kansas public radio dot org where you can listen to

many past episodes of k pr preserves that's at kansas public radio dot org look under news and then keep your prisons support for cape your presence on kansas public radio comes from but carlson center at something county community college presenting moments in openness cactus where modern dance to fix the american desert southwest practices lizards and insects september twenty nine details at jc cc dot edu its last carlson center this is k pr gone with the way and tequila mockingbird the great gatsby what book would you choose as the great american read i'm j mcintyre and the rest of today's k pr presents public television's search for america's best loved novel the lord's publicly ivory is getting into the great american raid with a series of events co sponsored by the university of kansas libraries

and casey pt polly kenny is coordinator of reader services at the lawrence library thanks for coming in today only well what's the idea behind the great american raid i think the main idea is to get our country talking about reading and having passionate reading conversations this is something i think that pbs hopes we can all get behind is or what our favorite read it is and that's something that can get everyone talking to each other what do you look for in a great read for me i know whether certain doorways for books i know my doorway is on character oh i really have to like the people are reading about or maybe just be interested usually at a lake and unlikable character but i i really have to love the people i'm spending time with in these stories and they really all love the idea of being transported out of where i am apt to somewhere else like i love it when you

know i just put the book down i can't stop thinking about in the book i am i love those kinds of books and so i am i love being transported out of my daily life has a way to sort of get away from things but then i like when i'm done with the book if that book took me then took me out of my daily life which taught me about another culture taught me about it another way of life those are my favorite one of the surprising aspects of the great american really is they're not all american actors agatha christie's on the land to cave dwelling we asked him what you do behind opening it up b i'm just american art if i'm not really sure i think a lot of it is just more what america is reading and and maybe not not so much that the authors have to be american but it did they have deftly impacted how america retreated sometimes when i think that they're going for and how does america read what kinds of things do we have in common when we're

choosing things like the great american novel right well you know i when i'm looking at the lists who first of all i'm not i remember the statistic but i read something and not too long ago that said out upwards of like twenty four percent of us don't you know maybe i think kareem was a big lesson for books a year and that hard to india what it is but you know i mean i'm very skewed i work with books all the time when i think at your book club percent so there's that piece of it there's maybe a lot of us who are reading right now for any particular reason but i'm not looking at this let's say i mean i'm noticing it seems like there's a rilke there's a mix of popular read slick things are bestsellers amman classics i wondered when they were pulling people if they got this mix of folks who were currently reading and so those are the folks he rattled off the bestsellers and folks who haven't read since high school and those are the folks who are like why do

i remember at the end and could maybe pull out those classics that they remembered reading or to what extent maybe you think one great american read that soon be a classic it soon be just the you know the that trashy novel i picked it and yet the list goes everywhere from like i said i said i would sort of think in the classics like moby dick has been the rye reading it includes things like fifty shades of gray and the davinci code in the twilight series where life is that well i think i am and i and i have noticed like when you watch the episodes they mean that the great american read but i notice when they talk about it during the episode state they're really careful to say more like america's best loved to read and so maybe they realize they're getting some pushback about will what you mean great and honestly you know gray can be you whatever to me as a librarian greatest whatever get somebody to read and whenever

get somebody in kitchens stories and and then talking about their stories with other people so i try really hard to not have a judgment or an opinion about how good the book is a more try to think about what are the hoax or what are the ways that this book is engaging people and you know sometimes i can look at a book and say whoa that writing might not be the best writing ive ever read but the story obviously is resonating with people in the stories obviously catching people in a way that is getting them reading a map that makes me happy is if they've read one book and they like it then they may become look for more and i can certainly find them are worried well let's get back to the great american race doesn't list of novels their novels vs the list does not include any nonfiction books i thought about what's gained or lost by focusing on novels i think every night i will say it i've also read that probably

as much nonfiction as i read fiction even though i'm in charge of the fiction department serving there are some really great books that were not asking about her are not presenting to people by not doing non fiction but i think the idea that perhaps was time to you know to center at its dissenter it on the novel ends and the story so i think they probably had to comment this had to narrow their scope and i've even had people tell me i wish they would have only chosen adult novels because you know on here you'll have surely doesn't hurt and how on earth and i'm going to choose between charlotte's web and the color purple because both of those novels rocked my world and for very different reasons at very different times in my life but i guess i'll say the one good thing about this is you don't have to pick just one that you can vote for multiple

books many times you devote every single day from every device you have and you can go for multiple books so maybe just do that and let the chips fall where you may have some pollyanna pajamas but what are you voting for great american novel okay so i have a few things i have voted for so far so i voted for the color purple is probably by alice walker miles workers probably my ultimate but for a while i was reading it once a year because i just loses and i must have picked it up at a time or i needed a panic that impacted me in such a way that i had to keep returning to it so and it's just it's this beautiful and i think it was clemson that was groundbreaking work at the time when it came out so i'm so that worked out lander which i love which is by diana gabaldon at it you know it's a juggernaut now but i read it back old you know twenty years ago or

so when i had small kids well at that time i had one small kid and i had sort of gotten out that i'd been in grad school and i'm working full time and i've just gotten out of this that the habit of reading for pleasure and so i that book brought pleasure reading back to me some serious escapism that books about old time travel in the scottish thailand so yeah you get it and that leaves you know she writes so precisely and bright so much detail that you feel do you are there when you're reading and so it was definitely like a little vacation in my mind and so that book was important to me harry potter has been so important to my children in the end we know by extension to me so i love harry potter its tail could you know beloved also killed me in college when i read that

buck you can see this is like asking me which of my children and my favorite soap so those books are have been really important to me and i'm sure there's someone here looking at the list there someone here that i i have lived in the record for other reasons at different options i'm visiting with polly can of the lawrence public library the library is partnering with k u libraries and casey pt for a series of events tied to the great american read pauline what have you got planned we thought we would scream the episodes so we we did one on september eleventh to kick up episode but it's if you saw the one in a pretty much saw the same thing and so and then we will have a series of five that our theme and so pbs has come up with a theme and then we're pairing that with some q professors or a local author actually who will be after the after hearing about episode will you don't speak to discuss

facilitate some discussion around that theme and so the first one is double the september eighteenth at seven pm who am i and led by daring kennedy professor of english and actually you that at seven pm and it's going to be at the cap fed business building and mccain camp is so parking should be really easy well have the years subsequent tuesday september twenty fifth as heroes led by read the fuller october second as villains and monsters led by to sell an asshole and laura moriarty october ninth is what we do for love led by nisha hardest cinnamon october sixteenth his other worlds led by philby to khat chews and author here in town and then also with mcdonnell reach out to chris mckitrick she says teaches a k u and decipher he says he's interested and so hopefully he will be an addition to what we're doing and so then that big thing is on october twenty third that is a live episode nobody knows all about what that one is what's gonna happen we don't know lake what could be an

air we don't know which it will be a win but so but that night is when they sort of they do have that last push for voting and then that's when the last book will be announced for big reveal know they were male and so two c p t is actually coming down and they are going to celebrate with us dare they are very excited lawrence's right now the top voter in seoul they wanna come down on a party with us because we obviously you know i've got it going on in the book department so we're hoping to try to make it a big thing you know we're talking about it should be bookish costumes i don't know i have designed taking this is my opportunity to wear a ball gown because whenever never it really should lead to figure out that's johan of wearable into this thing do you i'm asking questions or do you do you have any predictions about what you think that the winner well my guys know i don't although i suspect it will be something more on the highbrow and

i might be i have i i am i think to kill a mockingbird might take it booms that has a favorite i don't know anyone who doesn't love that book and i think it and i think it's such a classic that you can feel good about you know you can feel achy it's not it hasn't dated itself in a way that we as problematic so the balance you as to be older told me that that one is the other top vote getter in the region so we'll see what happens when it all comes together i feel like harry potter might be a comer to it probably depends depends a lot on the demographics of his floating as it always does in elections yes and if you think it i mean so much of that this voting is all electronic and so if you can get all of years you know millennials on their phones and voting for harry potter well they're going away in sidon now the summit doesn't like to get into production vote early vote that indeed

please do if people want to find out more about the great american raid and the lions leopards involvement or can i find a more well you can go to our web site el p l k s dot org there should be right smack on the front you can click on events and see what we're doing in case you don't remember when were doing me is every tuesday seven pm there will be some if you follow us on facebook or twitter we are pushing this out there were social media so check there to if you wanted to listen more in depth about this scam my colleague katie nye have the books club podcast which we do the wiring we did a whole episode on the great american read those are the best places to get us to stop it and see if the desk holly thank you so much you're welcome get out there and vote yeah but everyone what book would you vote for for the great american raid i'm kate mcintyre i pose that

question to some of our k pr staff starting with tom perkins and host of morning edition time if you had to pick one book for the great american read what would your speed ah that thats hardly know this list could be like a bucket list of books that actually everyone should read it sometime during like sos really hard to choose but the first book one of the first words i remember reading my aunt gave me a children's version of mark twain's adventures of tom sawyer was you know shorten children's version and that she inscribed in it to go to the town from missouri about a complimentary because of quantitative city and so i read that i was really intrigued on a few years later i was old enough to read the actual book and i just destroy it with mark twain and that bread i guess all of mark twain since then so it was hard to choose but i'd have to say that's it that's my number one i'm j

schafer and if i had to pick a book from this list i guess it would be grapes of wrath it reminds me of my childhood growing up on the hardscrabble high plains of west central kansas oh wait now that wasn't my life that was the life of my grandparents both sets of them that reminds me of the hardships they faced but unlike the joe the family of oklahoma my kansas grandparents didn't pull up their stakes and hit the road for selling fruit filled california so they stayed behind and worked hard their whole lives they were made from sturdy peasants talk it's not that they enjoyed hard times and just weren't quitters i'm jim watson and i'm most fond of the tales of haunted castles and quiet crips and monstrosities from the depths of british and you may therefore surmise my adoration of the elegant prose of the modern brinlee the us no more widely as frankenstein hi i'm laura lorson kansas public radio's all things considered host and my very favorite

book of all time is moby dick by herman melville thing is just the great american novel it's kind of about whales but it's mostly about everything else in the world i read it initially when i was probably twelve or thirteen years old and i didn't get anything out of it i read it again when i was about thirty and older son i just thought how how did they miss out on how wonderful this book was all these years it's it's funny and it's engaging and it's serious and it's wonderful i just encapsulates the american experience the world experience the experience of being human and i fear a book and i hope you get a chance to and i am cordelia brown i posed the classical music in the evenings here on cue pri call myself a classical friend and my favorite book is wuthering heights by emily bronte and first of all i think it's a great book because it's certainly an original story stern often you've just read the same old tale told in a different place or time or

format but weathering heights assembly a tail i had never heard before it is a big complicated in trying to keep the people stayed in both generations of the story but anyway i find it amazing that emily bronte who was supposedly this very sheltered young woman i think it's amazing that she could write something well not only so complex and i'll morally outrageous it certainly was at the time it's so romantic and so emotionally descriptive it's just dumb the story it shows the the strange world of dark emotion and a whole family through two generations and the love between the two main characters he's clef and catherine is the type of love that just goes beyond life literally and it's just dumb they're almost vampires in the way that they their love just really consumes

the first time i read it i was convinced that he's a clef was a villain and he was bad boy which he is but now in my fifties as i think about this story you know i think he was really the hero and dylan's clothing and i know most of all it's just incredibly romantic story he clarified desired catherine in a way that didn't even have thinking it was just beyond all reason it was just his feeling and that comes out so strongly in wuthering heights what book would i pick i could decide so i'm voting more than once so can you go to pbs dot org slash great american raid i'm katie mack entire k pr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas