The Great American Read

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, July 2018; written by Tammy Dinsmore

This spring and summer I have been reading from “The Great American Read” list put out by PBS. This is a list of 100 favorite novels that were chosen through a survey. Throughout the summer, voting will take place online for your favorite novel on their website (pbs.org/greatamericanread), or you can vote through social media. And we get to vote as many times as we want!

The list has a variety of genres, the titles can be from anywhere in the world but has to be in English, and each author is only allowed to be on the list once, although there are some series listed. This is a great opportunity for me to reach out and try something new. Some have been on my “to-read” list for a long time.

First off was “Call of the Wild” by Jack London. I don’t know what took me so long to read this one, but I loved it. A classic set during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. A dog named Buck is stolen from his family in California and sold to traders to become a sled dog. Buck has many owners during his time in the Klondike, some loving, some abusive. He learns to survive the harsh conditions and comes to love the wild. This is a great adventure story!

“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak was next. This Young Adult novel starts in 1939 in Germany and is told from the perspective of Death, who tells the story of Liesel Meminger. She and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with foster parents in a small town at the beginning of World War II. On the way, her brother dies and after they bury him and are leaving the cemetery, Liesel sees a book lying on the ground, “The Gravedigger’s Handbook”. She picks the book up, even though she doesn’t know how to read yet. This is how the book-stealing begins. With her beloved papa’s help, she learns how to read, and then reads to the people in the bomb shelters, the Jewish man they have hidden in their basement, and a neighbor lady. This story is of Liesel’s relationships with her new family and the people in her new town and the great losses in her life.

I am currently enjoying “Ready Player One” by Ernest Kline. This is a fun science fiction novel set in the not-so-distant future. I really don’t know how to describe this one! The setting is a virtual reality world where a young man is competing with pretty much the rest of the world to win the ultimate video game and find the “Golden Egg” and walk away with a multi-million dollar fortune. The game was created by an eccentric video game designer who amassed a fortune and didn’t have any heirs to leave his money to, so he designed the game. There are a lot of references to video games of the 1980s, so if you are or were a player of those games back in those days, you will get all of the references made in this book!

I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of this list, and I don’t know if we have all 100 titles here at the library, but what I can’t find here or through the Alaska Digital Library I will get through Interlibrary Loan!