By Leslie Albrecht
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER WEST SIDE — For some people St. Patrick's Day is about drinking green beer, but at the 72nd Street subway station early Thursday, the Irish holiday was celebrated with books.
Volunteers from the Irish Arts Center handed out free Irish literature to bleary-eyed commuters starting at 6:45 a.m. to kickoff Book Day, an event to highlight Ireland's rich literary contributions.
Organizers promised to hand out 10,000 free Irish books across the city by authors including Edna O'Brien, Maeve Binchy and Oscar Wilde.
"I'm sick of St. Patrick's Day being about people getting drunk and urinating in the street," said volunteer Vanessa Huang. "There's so much more to it. Hopefully now they can read some Irish literature and get into the spirit of it."
Huang, a high school teacher from Sydney, Australia, said she liked teaching Oscar Wilde's plays and the W. B. Yeats poem "The Second Coming," known for the lines, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."
She handed a copy of the Cork Literary Review to a passing security guard, who said he appreciated it, but didn't have time to read a long book. He traded it for a slimmer volume of poetry.
Volunteers at the 72nd Street subway station included several students from the new Frank McCourt High School, named in honor of the "Angela's Ashes" author.
Armed with stacks of the collected works of Frank O'Connor and Pete Hamill's "Forever," the teens competed with a man handing out Metro for the attention of commuters racing into the subway.
Some ignored them, some said "No, thank you," some were happy to grab a free book. "It's awesome," said Catherine Groene, who snagged a Maeve Binchy novel. "This is wonderful. I reject Metro, but a free book is definitely something I would take."
One student gave a copy of the 18th-century novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne to a grateful truck driver waiting for the light to turn green at West 71st Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
"In a today's world, when we're closing bookstores and shortening library hours, I can't think of anything better than giving out free books," said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side and helped create Frank McCourt High School. "And these are books you actually want to read."
Volunteer Maggie Thomas, a 14-year-old freshman at Frank McCourt High School, said she's currently reading "Watership Down," by the English author Richard Adams.
But she said Book Day inspired her to sample works from the Emerald Isle.
"My mom says I should read Yeats and I think I'll grab a copy," Thomas said. "She says he's the greatest Irish poet ever and I guess I should take a crack at him."
