We hear it all the time. “Who has time to read? It seems I have to be everywhere at once these days, so when am I going to find time to sit down and read?” And yet every week, thousands of people in Newtown sit down and read The Bee, and our most avid readers do so precisely because it helps them be everywhere at once.

The thing we like most about the written word is that it allows us to travel to places where we could not otherwise go –– even beyond the reality of our lives. We can transport ourselves to the far side of the world in the time it takes to pick up a newspaper. Pick up the right book, and you can travel through time backward and forward. The thing that excites us most about reading is that it can take you into the minds of others to perceive the full measure of their experience, their imagination, and their wisdom.

So when the Booth Library started handing out copies of the novel April Morning by Howard Fast on Monday, we lined up to get ours. The book is a coming-of-age story both for a boy and for our country, which were transformed on April 19, 1775, in the bloody battle of Lexington. It is about war and violence intruding on peace. It is about the rigid patriarchal rule of a father over a son and of an empire over its colony. It is about having new ideas and new perspectives and putting them to the test in extreme circumstances. It is about changing a bad world for the better. Read this book, and you may confuse it for today’s newspaper.

The purpose of the Newtown Reads initiative by the Booth Library is to bring the town together in a kind of communitywide book club, which has been tried successfully in other towns. The need for this kind of thing in a town like Newtown, which seems so much more “together” than most towns, might be questioned were it not for the timeliness of the questions raised and the ideas presented in April Morning. Is the role of Americans in the impending Battle of Baghdad related in any way to the role Americans played in the Battle of Lexington? Do ideals, logic, and integrity have any standing or meaning in the context of battle? What is it about war that brings out both the best and the worst in people?

What we know about the people of Newtown from their weekly townwide reading of The Newtown Bee, leads us to believe that there will many different interpretations of April Morning and its relevance for us today. We have learned over time that the conclusions people reach as a result of engaging each other in discussion and debate are ultimately less important than the act of engagement itself. Reading delivers us quickly to the great banquet of ideas in this world, so time spent reading is always time well spent. Sharing those ideas with others, however, is how we truly nourish our lives. It gives us the opportunity to offer something of ourselves – our thoughts. The name of this program is Newtown Reads. It should really be called Newtown Thinks.

Get a copy of the book from the library, or a friend, or your favorite bookstore, and join the conversation.