To Eat A Mockingbird – Kipen’s promise

David Kipen, the National Endowment for the Arts literature director, has promised to eat an entire copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if any one of the 128 residents of Ohio’s Kelleys Island – a four square mile island in Lake Erie – fails to read the book. Kipen runs The Big Read reading scheme and is a brave man.

I presume he’s talking about the paperback because the hardcover would be chewy and get stuck between his teeth. Mockingbird is 309 pages, so he should be able to do it. Thank God he isn’t pushing A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth – that sucker is 1349 pages in hardcover, 1488 pages in softcover and 591,552 words in total.