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Reading Is Fundamental

Hard to find anyone who would argue with that.  In fact, it’s a favorite soapbox of all kinds of politicians, who love to bemoan the state of literacy and the failure rate of American students on standardized testing of reading skills.

Well, to be fair, it’s one of my soapboxes too. The importance of reading, and getting kids (and other people) engaged with reading and learning, is something I’m really passionate about. And a big part of getting kids connected with books is to give them books. Seems obvious, I know. But not every kid grows up in a home filled with books,  or with parents who love reading and model it. There are a lot of adults who struggle with reading, or avoid it.  Some kids don’t even have a home… and without an address, you generally can’t get a library card.  And many don’t have the money to get a book of their own.

And that is why, as Nicholas Kristof wrote in a New York Times op-ed (a portion of which is quoted here) programs like Reading is Fundamental (RIF) and First Book are so vital to developing a nation of readers. The ownership of a book is an incredible gift of power. Not only does it increase children’s interest in and enjoyment of reading, but it positively affects family literacy and offers new opportunities for educators to involve their students in reading and learning.

So, if our elected officials agree that reading is vital, and programs like RIF and First Book encourage and promote literacy and reading for kids, families, and schools, with research supporting their practices, why are they cutting funding for these programs?

Hope for the future comes from reading and learning there’s more to life than what you see. Children, and the world,  need hope. And books. Or they’ll be left bereft, as well as behind.

Posted on July 25, 2011 by , Reply

Please Take Our Free Stuff!

It’s depressing enough to make me want to stop doing giveaways. This summer I’ve offered FREE BOOKS to people twice, announced the winners here, and contacted them myself, and I have gotten NO RESPONSE.

If you enter a contest here, and you don’t want the giveaway after you win it (?) PLEASE respond to us anyway and TELL US so we can give it away to someone who DOES want it. If I announce a contest winner on here and don’t get a response back at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com after one week has passed, I’m gonna pass the prize on to someone else. You know, someone who actually WANTS a free book.

And now back to our regularly scheduled musings.

Posted on July 19, 2011 by , 2 comments

Written In Blood

I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian so much that I gave it away to someone I thought would love it just as much. I guess she did, because she never returned it. Sherman Alexie is just that good. Honestly, I couldn’t believe Meghan Cox Gurdon could possibly be calling his work depraved. It’s a book that opens eyes- not one that turns out the light.

I am thrilled that he wrote a response to the Wall Street Journal, in their Speakeasy blog, titled “Why The Best Kids’ Books Are Written In Blood”. And I think what he said about his personal experience with books is so important to the way adults think about teens’ reading. Their experiences, and their reading, are often multidimensional. No one made me follow up Inherit the Wind with Ira Stone’s thick biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Reading Carrie didn’t stop me from reading Little Women. It doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of situation. And this is what Alexie expresses in a very personal way. He writes,

“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life”.

I know that’s an awfully long quote, but I think his words here are so important. In her book Don’t Tell The Grownups, Alison Lurie writes about how the very nature of important children’s books is subversive. Those books aren’t written to make grownups feel comfortable. They continue to be important because children need to find within themselves what makes grownups uncomfortable, and those books are where they discover how to live in a world in which they have very little control.

Thank you, Mr. Alexie, for speaking up.

Posted on June 11, 2011 by , Reply
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