One Book One Paterson: Turning the page

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 Bi...