BEA 2010: Random House Breakfast Packs in Librarians
Author Slaughter calls budget cuts at libraries a tragedy
Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 05/27/2010
- Slaughter volunteers to raise funds for libraries
- Kava recalls touring libraries
- NPR’s Norris offers memoir on the race conversation
Authors often sing the praises of librarians for introducing them to reading, helping with research, and promoting their books. But at the standing-room-only Random House librarians’ breakfast that opened BookExpo America on May 26, Karin Slaughter did more than that.
Rather than discuss her new novel, Broken (Delacorte, June), which combines her two popular series, Slaughter addressed budget cuts at libraries nationwide, which she saw as a tragedy akin to a tsunami.
Arguing that reading is essential because it opens us to our shared universe and teaches critical thinking—“there’s a reason why reading is restricted by people who want control,” she noted, like the slave owners who refused to allow slaves to learn to read—Slaughter insisted that keeping libraries open was “a matter of national defense.”
And it was not all talk. As Slaughter explained, she has volunteered to do fund raising for her local library (she lives in the Atlanta area), and she urged authors everywhere to do the same. Slaughter offers a page on her web site directly addressing librarians.
Librarians as organizers
Slaughter wasn’t the only author to focus her talk as much on libraries as on her own work. Recalling a 32-library tour throughout Nebraska after one of her books was chosen for the One Book, One Nebraska program, Alex Kava, author of Damaged (Doubleday, July), praised librarians as “the original community organizers.”
Kava cited events organized by librarians that included “Java with Kava”; a program with the Humane Society, as she was traveling in an RV with her five dogs; and events at a senior citizen center, a vineyard, and a bank (her book featured a bank robbery).
There was even a potluck supper that attracted 83 people on a night that a big football game was being played in town—“at a time when they say people don’t read,” she marveled.
Sources of inspiration
Throughout the breakfast, authors showed how varied the sources of their inspiration can be. In Twelve Rooms with a View (Shaye Areheart: Harmony), playwright Theresa Rebeck wanted to express a “reverence for those old spaces”—the grand apartments of old New York.
Matthew Galloway, whose debut, The Metropolis Case (Crown, December), alternates between the 1800s and the present, with all the characters related in some way to Wagner’s groundbreaking Tristan and Isolde, said that he hoped to “examine memory and the past and the search for meaning through love.” Look for YouTube clips to promote the book.
From the campaign to the self
Michele Norris, author of The Grace of Silence: A Memoir (Pantheon, September), cohost of NPR’s All Things Considered, at first intended to do original reporting that expanded on her coverage of the 2008 presidential vote and its consequences for our discussions on race.
“Then I discovered that in my own family the conversation on race had not been honest,” she noted, recalling how she learned only incidentally that her father had been shot in Birmingham, AL, after his return from World War II.
Her book turned into a memoir, with Morris hoping to show “how we are forged by what our parents choose to tell us and what they withhold.”
