Read KC’s Big Read book, then read this

Back in grade school, Mom made me sign up for the summer reading program, and I dutifully finished all the books and checked them off the list. So what if the only one that left an impression was S.E. Hinton’s teen-delinquent story That Was Then, This Is Now? So what if I went on to become a delinquent myself — I was a literate delinquent, damn it!

Because I love libraries, I’m a fan of the Big Read, which encourages everyone in a whole city to read the same book for a month. Sometimes this can have radical implications, as it did a couple of years ago, when cool librarians in KCK decided their Big Read book should be The Grapes of Wrath. With its foreclosures and job losses and socialist solutions, John Steinbeck’s classic hit close to home on the eve of economic destruction.

Now the metro-wide Big Read book is Tobias Wolff’s Old School. In it, a (white) kid goes to a (white) prep school and learns a hard lesson. It’s a touching and humorous coming-of-age yarn, with hilarious and profound guest appearances by (white) literary icons of the 20th century. It’s an OK way to blow 195 pages, but I kept wishing the whole city could be reading a different book, by a different author with the last name Wolff.

Daniel Wolff’s How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them (new from Bloomsbury USA) isn’t on the National Endowment for the Arts’ list of officially sanctioned Big Read books. It probably won’t be for a while, either, because it might make too strong a case for the shocking idea that school — whether it’s a prep academy like the one in Old School or a provisionally accredited school like those in the KCMO School District — is overrated.