Well, Radio Readers, how about this fabulously curious Fall 2024 book series “Through the Eyes of a Child”? What a fascinating stretch of reading over the past several months, right? Alice in Wonderland, Everything Sad is Untrue, The Blue Book of Nebo, and Long Way Down: our reading journey this fall has immersed us in various settings, genres, and cultures. And experiencing it through the views of children and teenagers, whether that view is invented, remembered, or observed by authors in their own various stages of adulthood. Which in itself seems like quite the trip, hmm?
But…you know…it’s not yet over! Book leaders and contributors from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, are coming together with High Plains Public Radio staff in Garden City KS for a live on-air book discussion on Sunday, November 17, starting at 3pm. The program can be heard across five states of the High Plains on FM stations and translators, and from anywhere at www.hppr.org . You call also download an app to your preferred mobile device. Your choice! That’s Sunday, November 17, starting at 1:00 pm.
Expect lively dialogue on wide-ranging topics, from Victorian oddities and fanciful humor, mystic medieval Persian sagas, post-apocalyptic diaries, and urban blood feuds. Whether a Victorian dream-scape, a Welsh countryside, a grade school in Oklahoma, or an elevator crowded with gunmen, we Radio Readers have definitely been in touch, through our Fall 2024 Read, with the world; in fact, we’ve been in touch with many and varied worlds: of ancient myth, animal fables, redemptive diaries; personal narrative and even poetry. We’ve explored the lives of children, marveled at their challenges to authority, resettlement, disaster and death. Facilitated by intriguing commentary of book leaders and contributors offering insight and connection between our own worlds and those of books in this series. Fantastical, culturally unfamiliar, dystopian, violent—whether our reading of these books has evoked bewilderment, bemusement, sorrow, even anger and hope , these characters’ stories give us so much to talk about.
It all happens Sunday, November 17!
But… just before that, another reading-listening opportunity! HPPR Radio Readers is proud to feature commentary every morning from November 11-15 on a newly released social history “Las Madres: Latinas in the Heartland Who Led Their Families to Success.” In this, his second chronicle of his family’s life in southwestern Kansas, Dennis Raphael Garcia recounts the lives of his great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, as they pursued the advancement of their families from poverty. In telling of their journeys, Garcia reminds us that there is no one true path to achieve an end, and inspires his readers to pursue our dreams.
This is what we’re all about this November, Radio Readers: Stories to help mediate reality and rechart our journeys through imagination and resilience, and maybe a soupcon of courage…Read on, talk it up, and tune in throughout the week of November 11, and also on November 17 for Radio Readers’ live on-air discussion.
For High Plains Public Radio, I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City KS.
