Farewell to Farewell to Manzanar

I noticed recently that students are checking out Farewell to Manzanar for school reading. That's too bad. I have long believed that Farewell to Manzanar is a stubbornly mediocre book that deserved to go out of print. It had gone out of print for years, but in 2001, when the ReadMOre committee plucked it out of its deserved obscurity to make it the inaugural selection for the 'statewide' reading program, it had a new print run. Now local libraries are flooded with copies and local schools are assigning it.

Not that I don't think it deals with an important issue -- the forced encampment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II -- I just don't think it presents a very thorough or well-written version of the incident. Not only that, but the characters leave the camps pretty early in the book and a significant portion of the story deals with the narrator's struggle to become a cheerleader in her high school after the war. Gripping stuff.

Much better books to read on this subject would be Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida or Fighting for Honor: Japanese Americans and World War II by Michael L. Cooper. Even David Guterson's moving 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, though a work of fiction, presents a better look at the time. And after all, didn't most of us learn about the Great Depression reading Grapes of Wrath? Or about the meat-packing industry reading The Jungle? Great literature teaches, and though there is always the question of veracity in a work of fiction, I don't think we should be telling students to read an otherwise mediocre book just because it deals with important events. As E. B. White once said, 'There are no boring subjects, only boring writers.'

But this, in a nutshell, is the problem I've had with getting behind the whole ReadMOre project all along. In the first place, I think we have enough people all reading the same book without encouraging it. How many people have read The Da Vinci Code? The Firm? The Harry Potter books? Do we really need a dedicated yearly project to encourage people to read the same book?

And if so, does it have to be a book nobody would ever want to read except that the committee recommended it? I have read some of the selections, by no means all of them, and I have found the exercise scarcely worth my time. Sure, Calvin Trillin's Messages from My Father was a nice little book, but it pretty much ended there -- a nice little book. Mississippi Solo, Enemy Women, Betsey Brown -- I understand that these books were picked for their local or regional connections. But is this really what we want to encourage everyone to read? Does it undermine the effort to get people to read great literature when we push forward such mediocrities as if this is important stuff?

What do you think?