One Read at 25

One Read is a community-wide reading program in Columbia, Missouri where Kit and I lived for three decades. The program encourages life-long learning among adults. Coordinated by Columbia’s  Daniel Boone Regional Library working with a task force of local media and community agencies, the One Read program has just completed its 25th year.

Each winter, the public submits suggestions for the next year’s selection to be read by the community.  In January, a panel of community members reviews the suggestions, narrowing that list down to 10 titles, and then chooses two or three books to present for a public vote as the year’s One Read selection. Once selected, 200 or more copies of the One Read book are made available throughout Boone County’s library system for the community to read over the coming months.  And each September, the author of the One Read book is invited to Columbia to speak about the author’s book. In addition, activities that relate to the topic of the book are planned by local theaters, art galleries, universities and colleges.

During the years that Kit and I lived in Boone County, we participated each year in the library’s annual One Read program and were introduced to books we might otherwise not have known about or read. And though we have lived in Nevada County in the Sierra Foothills of California for the past five years, we continue to participate from afar by reading each year’s One Read selection either purchased or checked out from our local public library. Among our favorite One Read books over the past 25 years are A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Boys in the Boat by Dan Brown, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

This year’s selection, Remarkably Bright Creatures by author Shelby Van Pelt, proved to be one of the community’s most memorable to date. On Tuesday, September 22, the cornerstone event of this year’s One Read program took place in Columbia’s historic Missouri Theater.  In a live conversation with former KFRU radio personality David Lile, author Shelby Van Pelt discussed the research and writing of her bestselling book Remarkable Bright Creatures and took questions from the audience that was estimated to be 982 book fans.

Van Pelt’s debut novel was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna “Today” Show book club pick.  In 2023, she was awarded the Heartland Prize for Fiction and the McLaughlin-Eastman-Stearns First Novel Prize from The Writer’s Center. This year, Remarkably Bright Creatures also became a hit Netflix movie starring Sally Field who recently won an Emmy for her role as Tova—a 70-year-old woman who lives alone in her childhood home and cleans the local Sowell Bay Aquarium each night to keep busy and enjoy the quiet company of the sea creatures.  

In the novel, we follow a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus (who narrates the story) as he helps the widow Tova uncover the truth about her son’s mysterious death by drowning 30 years ago.  In a recent radio interview, Lauren Williams, who has faithfully co-chaired the One Read program since it began 25 years ago, described Remarkably Bright Creatures as “a beautiful exploration of friendship, reckoning and hope—a reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.” I loved it, Columbia’s One Read community loved it, and I think you will as well.