educating alice

…While Amazon.com and other online booksellers boast lists of best sellers and a local librarian can advise on which books are in frequent circulation,
neither can tell you if any of these books were ever opened, much less
if they were read cover to cover. Renaissance Learning has unique
insight into the books kids are reading, and we are pleased to share this
information with you for the first time….

The above is from Renaissance Learning’s self-proclaimed “Groundbreaking Report” [sic]: What Books Are Students Reading in Grades 1–12?

Please. All this reports tells us is what books kids are reading for their school’s Accelerated Reader program. Cover to cover? Well, some kids may really be losing themselves in the books, but I suspect (based on my own years as a teacher and earlier ones as a kid doing SRA which was also quiz-based) that they are far more concerned with collecting book credits than in properly reading them. To my mind this report has way less crede than the above disparaged stats from booksellers and librarians. For those unfamiliar with AR, this is how it works (according to their own website):

It’s as Easy as 1-2-3

1. Student Reads a Book. Students choose books at their appropriate reading levels and read them at their own pace. Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.
2. Student Takes a Quiz. Accelerated Reader Enterprise offers more than 120,000 quizzes to help you motivate and monitor students’ reading and vocabulary growth.
3. You Get Information. You get immediate feedback on the reading and vocabulary progress of each student.

Seems benign, right? Well, not exactly. Well, hold on. See that “Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.”? Means, just that — not all books are part of this program. Besides, since when did a simplistic “quiz” indicated that a kid really read a book thoroughly? Hate to tell you, guys. It doesn’t.

About as groundbreaking as …. I don’t know…sliced bread?

April 8, 2008 — Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.”

Dyslexia Differs by Language: Discovery Channe

(Thanks to bookninja for this.)

In describing a woman who can effortlessly turn a man into a pig, is Homer criticizing men in general? Or only sailors? Do you personally know any women like that? Are any of them named Brandi? What time does her shift end?

Joe Queenan tries his hand at writing a few questions for readers in There Will Be a Test.

Also revealed is a gender divide. Among boys, 41% listed online computer game cheats as their favourite read, while online song lyrics came second. Nearly a third of boys said they loved reading because it helped them get better at hobbies. Girls took a different approach, with 39% saying they loved reading because it provided an escape, or quiet time to enjoy on their own.

The survey was compiled by using focus groups from which the 20 most loved and 20 most loathed reads were assembled. From this a “national conversation about reading” was launched, with teenagers logging on to the teen website Pizco to have their say. A total of 1,340 teenagers were also surveyed.

The above is from “Celebrity scandal and Anne Frank: the reading diary of British teenagers” a Guardian article about yet another survey about reading. Here are some of the results:

Most loved reads

1 Heat magazine

2 Bliss magazine; online song lyrics

3 Online computer game cheats

4 My own blog or fan fiction

5 The Harry Potter series

6 Anne Frank’s diary

7 Film scripts

8 Books by Anthony Horowitz

9 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis

10 BBC Online; the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books by Louise Rennison

Most loathed reads

1 Homework

2 Shakespeare

3 Books of over 100 pages

4 Magazine articles about skinny celebrities

5 Books assigned by school/teachers

6 Encyclopedias and dictionaries

7 The Beano

8 Music (scores); the Harry Potter series; maps/directions

9 Facebook

10 Financial Times; Anything in another language

For most of my lifetime, I’ve heard that reading is dead. In that time, disco has died, drive-in movies have nearly died, and something called The Clapper has come and gone through bedrooms across the nation.

Timothy Egan on “Book Lust” - Outposts - Op-Extra Columnist - Opinion - - New York Times Blog

(Thanks to Ruth Gordon for posting this link on the ALSC-L list)

With each new Harry Potter book release it would begin again—angry complaints that someone had “spoiled” the book for someone else. Not by leaving it out in the rain (as did one of my students in 1998 with my copy of the first book), but by making mention of something in the book in a public forum that was seen by others as spoiling their reading. Along with this came less than complimentary comments about those who read the end of the book first.

This came to mind upon reading Alison Morris’s post, “Are You Prone to Peeking?” and the associated comments. I appreciated Alison’s gentle query; a none-peeker she was curious about those who did. As an occasional peeker (more below), I was relieved that she only asked and did not place judgement on those who did. Unfortunately, too many others do.

So first of all, when and why do I peek? I do so when I am worried, when I’m racing through the book barely paying attention to any of the writing, only the plot, to find out if the characters are okay. I admit that I did page ahead just to see that Harry was okay at the end of that final book. I didn’t want to know how or why, just that he was okay and that Hermoine and Ron were too. I cared about them, a lot, and the idea that they wouldn’t survive their grand adventure troubled me greatly. I very quickly knew as I began reading that I needed that worry set at rest so I could get into the book to enjoy the adventure, to find out how they made it safely to the end.

I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose there have been occasions where I’ve looked ahead, as some commenters on Alison’s blog described, to see if the book was one I wanted to finish. That is, I might find it slow going and rather than immediately quitting, I might check further along to see if something there made it worth continuing.

Now, what bothers me so much about this issue is that some make it a moral issue. They write about it being a bad thing to do. Some get furious. Authors who feel they have carefully created a particular reading experience have expressed their discontent when readers do not take the route they had in mind.

“I [J.K. Rowling] loathe people who say, ‘I always read the ending of the book first.’ That really irritates me,” she said. It’s like someone coming to dinner, just opening the fridge and eating pudding, while you’re standing there still working on the starter. It’s not on. “Harry ’s fate known to millions, yet still secret.” MSNBC July 24, 2007

Just as I think it is perfectly fine not to finish a book, so I think it is okay to read ahead if you need to. After all, once the book is in the hand of the reader, it becomes theirs. It is no longer the author’s, the publisher’s, the bookseller’s, or the librarian’s (temporarily as it will be back in the library again, of course). I really like Philip Pullman’s concept of the democracy of reading. That reading is a private act that we readers are in charge of.

Nor do we have to read it [the book] in a way determined by someone else. We can skim, or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages; we can read it in the order in which it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please; we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it; we can put the book down and reflect, or we can go to the library and check what it claims to be fact against another authority; we can assent, or we can disagree. “The War on Words”, Guardian, November 4 2004

And there is Daniel Pennac’s Rights of the Reader with #2 being the right to skip. I’d go further and say readers have the right to skip about…to the end and back to the middle… wherever they want to go. Every book does not have to be read in a linear way.

So, please, don’t think I’m being bad, rude, unethical, or something else when I chose in my private act of reading to not read a book the way you did. Authors, please do not be offended if I read the end…it really just means you’ve done something right…made me care enough about your characters to want to know they end the story okay! The democracy of reading rules!

Authors are inclined to publicly endorse each other on the backs of their books, but it’s not all logrolling.

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: The ‘brilliant!’ virtues of blurbs

As in other recent novels on grandly cosmic themes—for instance, Philip Pullman’s ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy or Gene Wolfe’s majestic Book of the New Sun quartet—much in Aegypt remains open to speculation: Is there a significant reason that so many people are given names with repeated initials like RR and BB? What is the implication of the Sphinx’s real name (which we eventually learn)? Why does Pierce always correct misquotations of poetry? (Is this a way of suggesting that he is intended to correct a pervasive wrongness in things?) Is there a reason why Crowley, in his later volumes, starts to address the reader directly, almost chummily, assuring us that we doubtless already remember this detail or that? Are the increased number of passages about the nature of fiction meant to suggest, à la Borges, that we are all characters in a story, that history is a story? from “Souls Hungering After Meaning” By Michael Dirda

I’m beginning to think about what I want to read after Monday. One particularly ambitious possiblity would be John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence. I read John Crowley’s Little Big a few years ago and very much enjoyed its very distinctive fey feel and gorgeous writing. And then I came across Crowley’s blog, full of wonderful musings about writing and so much more. So the Aegypt books have intrigued me long before I read Dirda’s thoughtful and enticing essay about them.

There has been a lot of buzz about Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Many are outraged and the title certainly is designed to provoke. I am just curious; I wonder all the time about best sellers like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time — are people really reading these books or just buying them, reading the first chapter or so, and then talking about them as if they read them? What about talking about books only from their reviews? I don’t know about you, but I admit doing so and hear and see people doing it all the time, say on various online discussion groups.

In “The Great Unread” (thanks to bookninja for the tip), Bayard writes:

Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

Non-reading goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we’ve skimmed, books we’ve heard about and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven’t read.

To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them. Our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these spectres.

Rather than growling about him, I think we should be thinking and talking about this. I hope to get a chance to read his book one of these days instead of just talking/writing about it without having done so; frankly, I think he may be on to something.

Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors - New York Times