We are a community that reads!

This Area Is ‘Best-Read’ in the County!

It’s official. We are the Best-Read Community in America.

The Community Literacy Foundation’s One More Page project crossed its “1 million pages read” goal line back in mid-August, and as of December 31, the count stood at more than 1,543,148 pages read.

How much did you read this year? Were your pages read part of the official One More Page count? If so, you can be proud of the accomplishment. If not, you can take pride in knowing that the page count total should really be higher.

There is no way to know exactly how many readers contributed to the project because we only asked readers to submit their first names, but the list shows that every community in our area was represented —Union, Washington, St. Clair, Sullivan, New Haven, Beaufort, Labadie, Robertsville, Stanton, Pacific, Augusta, Villa Ridge . . . ””

— Dawn Kitchell, Chair of the Community Literacy Foundation

The Greater Franklin County Area was the boundary for the project, and both Scenic Regional and Washington Public libraries played a key role in helping achieve the goal. Both libraries compared their summer reading list totals with the One More Page master log to identify unrecorded pages read and add them to the count.

CLASSICS, FICTION, MAGAZINES, MORE

One of the most fun aspects of the project was seeing what people across the area were reading, Kitchell said. There were lots of classic book titles like “Persuasion” by Jane Austin, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Sherlock Holmes” and Walt Whitman poetry. There also were children’s books like “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” “Harry Potter,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” among others.

Newer fiction including “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins, “Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood and “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens was represented on the list, as well as non-fiction like “The Splendid and the Vile: a Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz” by Erik Larson, “Why We’re Polarized” by Ezra Klein and “The Greatest Generation” by Tom Brokaw.

There was one woman who logged reading the Bible every day, and there were others who reported reading daily devotionals. There was a lot magazine reading, including the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Real Simple, Southern Living, Good Housekeeping, Missouri Conservationist and the Elks magazine, to name a few.

Most readers submitted their reading logs online, but there were quite a few who submitted hand-written logs. Many logged their page counts after reading individual books, but others added up their total over several weeks or even months and submitted large counts — one reader sent in a log with more than 9,700 pages read and another reader had more than 12,000 pages read.

It’s also interesting to note that the youngest reader was 1, the oldest was 87, and Our Lady of Lourdes Grade School in Washington was the most-read school.

At Washington High School, Library Media Specialist Ann Loesing encouraged students to participate in One More Page by creating a friendly competition between classrooms, promising a pizza party to the class with the highest number of pages read. The result was 44,251 pages read by WHS students, including Jack Sullentrup.

“I read two books and just recently started a third,” Sullentrup reported back in December, noting his titles included “Danger Zone” by David Klass, "Freddie Steinmark Faith, Family, Football" by Bower Yousse and Thomas J. Cryan, and "Open Your Eyes" by Jake Olson. “I'm up to a total of 540 pages so far.”

Sullentrup said he wanted to participate in One More Page because he enjoys reading and the competition Loesing created made it even more fun. “With our whole class contributing, as well a girl in my third-hour class reading a very large amount of pages, we had a really good buildup of pages read,” Sullentrup said. “It is a great feeling that we achieved the goal. One million pages is a lot of pages to read for one community. It's really cool to be a part of something like this in our town.”

Kitchell was excited to hear about the WHS class competition. It is what she had envisioned happening in schools all across the area before the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

“It would have been fun to see what kind of friendly competition we could have created between classrooms or schools, but with all of the changes in education as a result of the pandemic, that wasn’t possible,” Kitchell said.

Lesley Liesman, Foundation board member, said she was impressed with how readers responded to the project, despite the pandemic and all of the stress and anxiety that has come with it.

“People are creating new habits, new routines, centered on reading or listening to audiobooks,” Liesman said. “In this pandemic year, people are reading through uncertainty. People are reading to escape, and people are reading to learn and better themselves on unfamiliar topics.

“This challenge has opened up conversations with neighbors that might have gone unsaid,” Liesman added. “It has reignited a fire in others who lost their passion for reading. Mostly, I feel it served as a connecting point for our community — a safe place to share good reads and permission to feel freer to read.”

SELF-PROCLAIMED, BUT MEANINGFUL

The inspiration for launching One More Page was a customer at Neighborhood Reads bookstore in downtown Washington, who several years ago read about how another community had claimed itself to be the “best read.” She told Kitchell, who owns Neighborhood Reads, that she thought our community could put up a challenge to that claim. After researching the idea and how best to gauge readership (pages read, rather than minutes or books), Kitchell presented the idea to the Community Literacy Foundation Board.

“There is no other community that we can find that has documented its reading by the number of pages read in a year,” Kitchell said.

The fact that the title of Best-Read Community is self-reported and self-proclaimed doesn’t diminish its value, Liesman stressed.

“This year, almost everyone has had to pivot their lives in some way — shifting to a new work set-up, tackling the role as home educator, maintaining mental health while going without seeing loved ones, and celebrating holidays/milestones in different ways,” she said

“This self-proclaimed title of ‘Best Read Community’ is especially meaningful because this year, when change in circumstances and scheduling is the constant, people are finding the time and mental space to enjoy reading again. And that’s a good thing.”

— Lesley Liesman, Vice Chairperson, Community Literacy Foundation

NEW GOAL IS TO INSPIRE, CHALLENGE OTHER COMMUNITIES

Now that we have laid claim to the title of Best Read Community in America, the Community Literacy Foundation fully expects and actually hopes another community or two out there tries to challenge it. Nothing would be better than if this project encouraged more reading everywhere, said Kitchell.

The Community Literacy Foundation will be reaching out to city leaders in each of the communities that participated in the project to recognize and celebrate the achievement. “We want each community to recognize the project, because they all participated,” said Kitchell. “It was a group effort.”  

The nonprofit, which marked its one-year anniversary in the fall, has seen its mission strengthened by the One More Page project.

“Since our inception one year ago, we've strengthened partnerships with local schools and libraries to ensure every person has access to reading materials and are able to reap the benefits of escaping reality, if only one page at a time,” Liesman said. “We want to continue the trend.”