Reading grant approved (12/20/03)

If one of your Christmas presents next week is Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, don’t read it right away.

Wait until March, and read it with hundreds of other Jay County residents.

The Ball Brothers Foundation awarded a grant Friday of $7,500 to the Jay County Public Library for the first-ever Jay County Reads! event.

“Jay County Reads! will be a community-wide reading program where all of Jay County will come together and read the same book,” said Miranda Hummel, adult services librarian.

Area residents will read the book on their own, then come together for a wide variety of discussion groups and related events.

Similar community-wide reading programs have been conducted around the United States, but only a handful in Indiana. Most of those have been in much larger communities than Jay County.

Hummel said plans call for folks who are interested in participating to order copies of the book beginning in February. March is set aside for reading. And discussion groups will be conducted in April.

Details on discussion groups and related activities will be announced later.

A token fee of $2 will be charged for each book.

Hummel said the library staff had been “kicking around” the idea of a community reading project for some time, but the real initiative came from the Ball Brothers Foundation, which is based in Muncie.

The best-seller Tuesdays With Morrie was selected after discussions with a number of different people in the community.

It’s also a book which has proven popular with a broad range of readers and has been used successfully in similar community-wide reading projects around the country.

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