Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
Last weekend, 12 bells and four books rang in the new reading year for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.
At 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, a crowd of Chautauquans gathered outside the Miller Bell Tower to commemorate a new reading year and celebrate the recent graduates from the CLSC.
The ceremony includes a reading from a poem, call-and-responses related to the power of reading and, perhaps most importantly, the reveal of the very first CLSC reading selections for the year.
Originally held in the fall, the celebration commemorates William Cullen Bryant, an early proponent for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, which was founded in 1878.
“Bryant encouraged the CLSC that Chautauqua should not just exist here within the gates in what was then a two- to three-week season, but instead project outward,” said Jordan Steves, the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education.
The ceremony opened with Alumni Association of the CLSC President Pat McDonald reading from a poem by Mrs. Grace Livingston-Hill-Lutz — an annual tradition — and Chautauqua’s Motet Choir led the crowd in a song reflecting on the joys of reading.
Steves announced the 2025–26 CLSC vertical theme: “Translation.”
“Translation is more than a rendition of words from one language to another,” he said. “Translation invokes how we convey meaning to one another, person-to-person, country-to-country and page-to-page.”
In 2026, Chautauquans are encouraged to explore what it means to translate globally, locally and personally in a year that celebrates America’s semiquincentennial.
Managing Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt unwrapped the first book, This is the Only Kingdom: A Novel by Jaquira Díaz, selected for a CLSC Unbound webinar scheduled for mid-November.
“We started the CLSC Unbound program this past spring, and the goal is to extend the CLSC reading year, extend our list of books and, of course, extend the reading experience beyond the gate via Zoom webinar,” Hunt said.
Díaz’s novel follows a mother and her child in the wake of a murder, set against the backdrop of a working-class barrio in Puerto Rico. In an immersive and moving portrait of family, Díaz delivers a love letter to mothers, daughters and the communities that build them.
The second selection was for Week One in 2026: Anna North’s forthcoming Bog Queen: A Novel. In a week themed “Icons and Instigators: Women Who Change the World,” the novel follows a forensic anthropologist’s discovery of a body in a bog in northern England, quickly absorbing her into a tumultuous history that links two young women across a landscape more complex than they could have ever imagined.
North will return to Chautauqua after presenting her novel Outlawed for the CLSC in the 2022 summer season.
For Week Five’s theme “Art and Artists Against the Odds,” the CLSC selection is Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls. Across three generations of Chinese women, Hulls traces reverberations of Chinese history in a novel that explores grief, exile and identity.
Growing up with her grandmother, a journalist during the turmoil leading up to the 1949 Communist Victory, Hulls bears witness to mental illness and trauma that plague her grandmother and mother while carrying the love that ties the three of them together.
In addition to the CLSC selections, Hunt revealed a CLSC Young Readers selection for Week Six, commemorating America’s 250th anniversary: Rebellion 1776: A Novel, by Laurie Halse Anderson. The middle-grade historical fiction novel follows a girl struggling to survive the smallpox epidemic, the public sphere of inoculation and the seething Revolutionary War.
The ceremony closed with a call-and-response from Steves, a celebratory song with the Motet Choir and the ringing from the Miller Bell Tower 12 times in honor of the 12 books required to graduate from the CLSC.
“All that humankind has done, thought, gained or been, is lying as is in magic preservation in the pages of books,” Steves read in the call-and-response. “They are our chosen possessions.”
