Comment; read all about it.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 11-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Things may be a bit better. Spring- training games have begun, the very early forsythia already feels old, and here's a nice ongoing book fight to brighten your mornings. As the Chicago Tribune reports, Nancy Pearl, the executive director of the Washington Center for the Book, in Seattle, started the whole thing back in 1998, when she proposed that everybody in town read the same book at the same time. Within days, it seemed, all Seattle was nose-down into the Russell Banks novel "The Sweet Hereafter" (selected, perhaps, for its bad weather), while other literocentric burgs hurried to fall into line. A Chicago group, One Book One Chicago, settled on Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," and tens of thousands of local readers (by the estimate of Mary Dempsey, the commissioner of the Chicago Public Library) fell happily or doggedly into that famous good read, suppressing guilty flick-memories of Gregory Peck's tilting, anti-injustice chin and Robert Duvall's scary Boo Radley shamble. Since then, San Francisco has picked "The Grapes...

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