It’s Book Announcement Day!

By Deborah Van Duinen

It’s always a happy day when we get to announce the books for our upcoming Big Read program! In fact, to our Big Read team, it feels a bit like Christmas!

We’ve been preparing our 2024 program for months and doing lots of work behind the scenes. We’ve been arranging author visits, researching our books’ authors, topics, and themes, collaborating with our amazing community partners to offer over 150 book-related events in October and November, meeting with local teachers to support their use of our books in their classrooms…the list could go on!

This year we’ve chosen a Big Read book unlike any of our previous selections. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is our “oldest” book to date (first published in 1925!) and the only book we’ve chosen by an author who is not alive. It’s also the book that might be the most familiar to our Lakeshore readers.

Many people “had” to read The Great Gatsby in high school. For a future English major like me, reading and discussing The Great Gatsby was like opening up a door to an exciting world of literary symbols, complicated characters, and complex themes. In fact, I still have my 9th grade copy of the book with all of the notes I wrote in it!

For others, a required reading of The Great Gatsby during high school days wasn’t as magical. It might be the book you disliked the most or maybe you only “fake read” it because it didn’t seem interesting.

Regardless of any earlier experiences with Gatsby, we encourage everyone to join in our program by rereading this book. Good books are often books that we can read at different times in our lives and notice, delight in, or reflect on new or different things.

We’re excited for our community to discuss the following questions:

• Is The Great Gatsby “the great American novel”? If so, why? If not, why not?
• Is it a classic? If so, what makes it a classic?
• The Great Gatsby was written 100 years ago. How does it speak to our day and age today?

To deepen our conversations, we’ve paired The Great Gatsby with Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese. Yang’s book, written in 2006, is considered a classic in the graphic novel world. Like the characters in The Great Gatsby, the characters in Yang’s book wrestle with identity, belonging, and their dreams. We encourage our Lakeshore readers to read American Born Chinese alongside The Great Gatsby and reflect on how these two texts might speak with and against each other.

We also encourage our Lakeshore readers to attend one of our many Big Read related events. There truly is something for everyone! Our amazing community partners, from libraries and museums to non-profit organizations, have organized an impressive array of Gatsby and 1920s themed events. Go to our Big Read Lakeshore website for more information about all of these exciting events.

In next week’s blog post, I’ll discuss our Middle Read book choice, Mexikid, by Pedro Martin along with our Little Read book choice, Dreamers, by Yuyi Morales. Stay tuned!