For more than a decade, Chicken Littles have been clucking that printed books would soon be relics of the past. As it turns out, however, the proverbial sky is not falling — quite the opposite, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center study that found ink-and-paper tomes are still the favored mode among readers. That’s good news for the Santa Barbara Public Library, which each year hosts Santa Barbara Reads, a community offshoot of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read in which one book is selected, thousands of free copies are given out, and events and reading and discussion groups are formed so people can talk about what they’ve read. This year’s S.B. Reads selection was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a dystopian science-fiction story about a pandemic flu that kills off most of Earth’s population.
In an effort to engage the community even further, the Santa Barbara Independent teamed up with the library and held an essay contest for adults and teens. After culling through myriad entries, Maria Delgado and Lora Vachovska were chosen as the winners. The question they both wrote to was, “What would you miss if our modern-day civilization collapsed?” and rather than answer it literally, they injected themselves into the book’s setting. Here are the winning essays.
Maria Delgado (Adult)