John Sutherland never made good on his promise to eat Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence if it failed to win the Booker prize, so here's hoping America's National Endowment for the Arts literature director David Kipen will prove more honourable.

Kipen, programme director of American community reading scheme The Big Read, has vowed to eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if any one of the 128 residents of Kelleys Island in Ohio fails to read the book. Weighing in at 309 pages, it is at least likely that Harper Lee's classic tale of racial prejudice will prove more digestible than Rushdie's 464-page novel.

So far, according to local paper the Sandusky Register, 70 residents have pledged to read the book, but Kipen, an author and book critic, needs the remaining 58 to sign up, or he'll be facing a nasty case of indigestion. If everyone living on the island reads To Kill a Mockingbird, and signs an affidavit promising they've done so, Kipen has said he'll buy them all a pizza.

Kipen said he had long wanted to find a town "small enough and brave enough to accept the challenge of dragooning every last literate resident, without exception, into tackling its chosen book", when Kelleys Island, a four square mile island in Lake Erie, was suggested to him. He didn't say whether he'd be tackling the hardback or the paperback edition of the novel if he fails to convince the island to get reading.

Sutherland said last year that if The Enchantress of Florence didn't win the Booker, he'd "curry [his] proof copy and eat it". It didn't. And he didn't.