Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023)
“I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time,” he told the Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”
A 1942 poster with words from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Books UnBanned
Books UnBanned offers readers between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, anywhere in the United States, a year’s free access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s e-books and audiobooks.
Don’t like a library book?
From Take action for libraries, a handy step-by-step guide: “What do I do if I don't like a book at the library?”
About reading
Catherine Rampell, writing in The Washington Post : “Call me old-school, but maybe we should devote less energy to limiting what kids are reading and more to whether they can read at all.”
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eighth year. A full report follows.
Reading in NYC schools
“Over the next two years, the city’s 32 local school districts will adopt one of three curriculums selected by their superintendents. The curriculums use evidence-supported practices, including phonics — which teaches children how to decode letter sounds — and avoid strategies many reading experts say are flawed, like teaching children to use picture clues to guess words.” Right on.
Reading as a civil-rights issue
From The New York Times: “Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for ‘the science of reading.‘ Can they get results?” With news about a new documentary, The Right to Read. From the trailer: “This is a civil-rights issue.” LeVar Burton is the executive producer.
Education and freedom
MLK on education as the key to freedom. Helen Moore on reading as the key to freedom.
Sold a Story : responses
Two responses to the podcast Sold a Story : How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong: a letter signed by fifty-eight teachers, writers, and administrators, “A call for rejecting the newest reading wars,” and a reply to that letter signed by more than 650 current and former teachers, “For the students we wish we’d taught better.”
A last 2¢ about phonics
Imagine trying to learn a new language — Greek, say, in any of its varieties. It would be impossible to figure out words and their pronunciation without knowing the sounds that the letters make. Now imagine being four or five or six and learning to read in your own first language. It would be impossible to figure out words and their pronunciation without knowing the sounds that the letters make. I think that’s the clearest case that can be made for the importance of phonics.
To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell
An e-mail to three prime movers behind the mistaken forms of reading instruction examined in the podcast Sold a Story.
Sold a Story again
Only last night did it occur to me to wonder: when college instructors outline the textbook in class and give out “study sheets” (i.e., questions and answers) for exams, are they merely slacking off, or are they compensating, consciously or not, for their students’ reading deficiencies?
Sold a Story
Coming tomorrow, from American Public Media, a podcast series by Emily Hanford: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
“5 MIN READ”
For a while I never noticed the new reading-time estimates that accompany Times headlines. Now I can’t help noticing them, and I’m aghast. Seeing an estimate attached to a review of two books about attention and technology makes my ironymeter go haywire.
Phonics redux
In The New York Times, an article about phonics and reading instruction.
FSRC: annual report
Our household’s two-person reading club: novels, novellas, short-story collections, graphic novels, non-fiction, a Socratic dialogue, a children’s story, and a poem.
“Before Amy came in”
Giving up on Henry James.
Q & Q & Q & A
From Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.
Reading in NYC
From The New York Times, photographs of people reading in New York City.
“Favorite Books”
An anonymous reader asked me to “correct” the Favorite Books section of my Blogger profile by listing titles instead of writers. From my point of view, there’s nothing to fix. As my wife Elaine suggests, you can take any name on the list as prefaced by the words “anything by.”
FSRC: annual report
Nine novels, two plays, one short-story collection, and one mountain.
Person, woman, man, books, TV
A president and his sister: “What do you do?” the president asked. “I read,” Barry replied. “What do you read?” the president said. “Books,” Barry said.
Chicken and cheese
As a boy, with Dracula as my inspiration, I would add a slice of American cheese to my plate whenever we had chicken for dinner. Cheese, right?
“Hearing an iron rod being sawed”
Xavier de Maistre again, with a deleted passage restored.
“Three steps backwards”
Xavier de Maistre prepares for a second journey.
“I rarely follow a straight line”
From Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room.
Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust
Proust describes how he felt when he came to the end of a book in childhood, secretly reading late at night in bed.
A “lethal aversion to reading”
“It's not a stretch to say that if the president read, thousands of lives might have been saved”: in The Week, Windsor Mann writes about Donald Trump*’s “lethal aversion to reading.”
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year.