Notebook: The Book Givers

On the road with the House of Speakeasy Bookmobile. A scene from their 2019 “Poetry to the People Tour,” a 4,000-mile cross-country odyssey bringing readings and workshops to eighteen cities and distributing over five thousand books

The state of Tennessee last month, responding to estimated covid-related summer reading losses of 50 percent among third graders, announced a program to distribute almost a million free books to young children, including every rising public-school first and second grader. (Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wryly observed that this gesture might go some way toward mitigating the bad rep the state earned among literati a few weeks previously when one of its school districts banned Art Spiegelman’s Maus for alleged prurience, and a local pastor and a state representative followed up by endorsing book-burning, a curatorial measure more frequently associated with that book’s villains. Tennessee lawmakers in March approved a bill that would expose librarians to criminal penalties for books on their shelves.) Tennessee ranks thirty-first in the country for reading proficiency.