Linn Area Reads: Let’s read together

Each year, a committee made up of library staff from the Cedar Rapids, Hiawatha and Marion public libraries, along with a small group of committed volunteers, come together to select a book. The selection process is not an easy one. It requires hours of reviewing the countless options. It means many discussions about the benefits of one book over another. The debate to choose a book is nearly as intense as the debate we hope the book will spark. This book becomes the annual selection for Linn Area Reads, a communitywide reading program designed to engage the community in reading and discussing the same book.

There are many reasons a book might be selected for a reading program like Linn Area Reads. The committee seeks something well-written, topical, and most of all, sure to start a discussion. Their goals are to engage the community in discussion and debate over current issues, while at the same time promoting literacy.

This year, the committee selected Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a novel telling the story of patients in a psychiatric ward during the early 1960s.

The book was based largely on Kesey's own experience working the graveyard shift as a nurse's aide in the psychiatric ward of a veterans' hospital. Published in 1962, the novel is set in a mental ward and features its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the loudmouthed and fun-loving inmate who opposes her. The novel is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Native American patient.

The book is a dramatic narrative questioning institutional processes, and presents a dark picture of the state of our mental health services at that time in our history.

The Linn Are Reads committee selected Kesey's book because, while more than 50 years have passed since the publishing of this classic American novel, the themes remain relevant today. The issues of mental health and behavioral health services remain topics of concern, and the way in which we pay for these services continues to be debated in Iowa and around the country. Barriers to care still keep thousands of individuals each year from seeking the help they need. These barriers might be locating the right services in the community, difficulty using or accessing mental health benefits provided by insurance, inability to pay for treatment, or a complete lack of services.

The Linn Area Reads program is a wonderful opportunity for the community to read a book together. It also offers a perfect chance to talk to each other about our priorities and about how to care for those most vulnerable in our communities.

We will bring together experts in the field to discuss the current state of our mental and behavioral health services during a community forum on March 10 at 7 p.m., at the Cedar Rapids Public Library. Then join us on March 24 at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers for a moderated book discussion. Finally, we will show the Oscar-winning movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson, on March 31 at 6:30 p.m., at the Cedar Rapids Public Library.

All three events are free. We encourage everyone to participate. Read the book. Be a part of the discussion. What would happen if everyone read the same book? What would we learn about our own community? Let's find out.

' Amber Mussman is community relations manager for the Cedar Rapids Public Library and a member of the Linn Area Reads Committee. Comments: mussmana@crlibrary.org; (319) 261-READ

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