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http://www.fairfieldpubliclibrary.org/obot/

We are busily preparing for the December 1st announcement of our 2011 One Book One Town selection. The books (all 200 of them!) are on their way and planning for a month of amazing events and programs has begun.

This week’s tantalizing (and trivial) tidbit? Our 2011 One Book One Town selection is written by an award-winning author renowned for their unconventional writing style…

Feel free to guess in our comments section!

Hello readers of Fairfield!

The One Book One Town selection for 2011 has been made. We will reveal the title on Wednesday, December 1st. On that day, you can be the first to pick up a copy to read at the Fairfield Public Library, Woods Branch Library, Pequot Library or Borders Books and Music.

For those of you who cannot bear the anticipation, check back to this blog for some hints every week.

This week’s tidbit: Once again, we have selected a book that is very different than any book we’ve chosen before…

Amazing books like Three Cups of Tea, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and Into the Beautiful North don’t just ‘happen.’

It takes the One Book One Town selection committee (made up of current and former library staffers from the Main Library, Woods Branch, and Pequot Library, and representatives from all our partner organizations) almost five months to pick out the book that will be unveiled each December as our One Book One Town community read.

Can you believe it?

We sift through dozens of potential titles – and like last year, we want your input!

Is there a book you just could not put down in the past few months? One that you were practically stopping strangers in the street saying “Stop everything and READ THIS RIGHT NOW?!?”

Well, it just might be the next One Book One Town. Tell us your suggestions here, or let us know by commenting below. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

A deep and heartfelt thank you from the Fairfield Public Library and the Pequot Library to all who participated in our third One Book One Town event!

We’d like to thank everyone who made this month possible, from our book selection committee members (who really do spend 6 months reading, discussing, and politely battling over titles), to our community partners who held such intriguing and spellbinding programs, to our planning committee members who got the word out and  made sure everything ran smoothly, to our amazing corporate sponsors and the local media contacts that keep our program front page news.

Most especially, we’d like to thank the Friends of the Fairfield Public Library, who brought us our fabulous author, Mr. Luis Alberto Urrea.

And lastly, we’d like to thank the Fairfielders of all ages who read the book, attended events, and came out to hear Mr. Urrea speak, a truly unforgettable experience.

As this year’s festivities draw to a close, it is time to turn our attention to next year, and One Book One Town 2011!

If you’d like to share your stories about this year’s book, please feel free to comment on this post. Also, if you have a suggestion for next year’s townwide read, do not hesitate to contact us or post your suggestion here!

If you’ve read Into the Beautiful North, you know that Kankakee is the ultimate destination of Nayeli’s quest  for answers. But you may not realize that Kankakee is a real place, and that Luis Alberto Urrea modeled several characters from the book on the real people who live and work there.

Here is a letter from Mr. Stephen Bertrand, Director of the Kankakee Public Library:

It’s difficult to put into words what Luis has meant to us. The best description of what happened appears in an article Luis wrote about us in the New York Times. (We gasped when he did that!) The article can be read at Kankakee Gets Its Groove Back

We also have podcasts of the talks that Luis did at our Library. They are here  and here

The president of our Friends of the Library group who brought him to our Library passed away in 2007. Luis returned to our Library for free in 2009 to participate in a fund-raiser in her honor and as a launch for Into the Beautiful North. I produced a video to welcome him back in which members of our community read from his New York Times article. Here is that video.

We here in Kankakee were thrilled that Luis had chosen to feature our town in his book. We never could have expected that an author would fall in love with our community in that way. The Librarian in the book, Mary Jo, is a composite of our late Friends President Mary Jo Johnston and all the other librarians here. He also used Detective Aurelio Garcia of the Kankakee Police as the model for the large kindly Mexican police officer in the book. Aurelio is the grey haired man with the crew cut in the welcome video and is the father of one of our staff members. His description of our town and Library takes some minor poetic licenses, but he captures the spirit of our City and Library perfectly. The landmarks he uses are all real.

What he captures very well is the phenomena of immigrants coming here from the town of Guanajuato, Mexico looking for work. Kankakee named Guanajuato her sister city some years back. The Mexicans in town reflect the classic American immigrant story. They are largely poor, work incredibly hard, and strive to make a better life for their kids, just like Nayeli’s father in Into the Beautiful North.

It’s hard to describe what it means to have a world-renowned author swoop into our City like a patron saint. We have always believed we are special, though we have struggled with economic downturns and crime like most other Midwestern industrial cities. It is wonderfully affirming to have someone like Luis Urrea come from the outside and say in his words both spoken and written, “Good Job!”