One Book One Paterson: Turning the page

Have you read A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines yet? All of Paterson is reading this book for the One Book One Paterson campaign. Before the campaign launched in February, I searched online for an audio version but with no luck. So, I downloaded and listened to the play instead. The play, based on the book, was easy to listen to in the car. Although it is very emotional and a tearjerker in some places, it was good distraction for my trips to Trenton, up and down the Parkway and Turnpike.  In fact, I listened to nothing else on the car radio while I was driving alone. Some evenings I would pull into my driveway and sit there listening for a while until I got to the end of the chapter. My husband would call from inside the house to see if I’m OK. (After so many years you’d think he expected this by now!) Once the campaign launched, I knew I would have to make the time to read the actual book. I’m about halfway through and WOW! This an awesome piece of literature! While it is

Paterson is a beautiful city, one full of history, cultural diversity and some of the sweetest people I have ever met. As a Palestinian American, I am so grateful to the City of Paterson for offering a safe space for me to be who I am. Walking down Main Street, I feel like I am back home, walking through the crowded bazaar to get to my grandmother’s house with the Muslim call to prayer echoing off the walls of the Old City.      Though Paterson has allowed my family and I to find a piece of home away from home, I want to embrace Paterson’s diversity and familiarize myself with the different cultures that live side by side. One Book One Paterson helps me do just that.      There is something so special about being able to discuss a great book, especially with people of different backgrounds. The perspective shift allows us to dive further into the literature and to discover layers we might have previously ignored. We learn more about ourselves and the world around us when we take a

Over the next several months the City of Paterson will be engaging in an extremely exciting experience. Imagine...everyone in the city reading and discussing the same book!! That’s what ONE BOOK ONE PATERSON is all about! The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program has afforded Paterson the opportunity to read Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying as a collective body. The book is the late author’s eighth novel, published in 1993. It is a fictional work based in part on the life of Willie Francis, a black teenager sentenced to death twice in Louisiana. There are a number of significant themes running throughout the novel including: constructive lying, religion, cynicism and hope, women and femininity, education and “The Inescapable Path.” All these themes set the tone for awesome topics of discussion. Spearheaded by a group of community stakeholders the citizens of Paterson will partake in a variety of special events planned around this wonderful novel. Some o

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has developed a program called the Big Read. The idea is based on a simple question: What if everyone in the city read the same book? No matter who you meet, you’d have something to talk about. We’d all have another layer to add to our shared experiences. It could be amazing to have us all rooting for the same protagonist, puzzling the same plots, enjoying a collective climax--literary climax. I suspect that everyone will come away from the book with slightly different interpretations since we each have our life experiences that will, undoubtable, filter the experience that we have while reading. Those filters are part of what makes reading the same book all the more exciting. Cities all over the nation are participating in the Big Read. Each city has adopted a name and a book. Our name is One Book One Paterson . Our slogan is Turning the page. Our book is A Lesson Before Dying by Earnest Gaines. Participants in the  NEA’s Big Re