How long do you keep reading?

One of my favorite authors, Dan Simmons, has a new book - Drood. It is not science fiction, is 800 pages long, and has received mixed reviews. And the Kindle version sells for $14.99 instead of the normal $9.99. All those extra bits and bytes for such a long book, I suppose. Simmon's last book, The Terror, was a grueling read. I think I may wait and check this one out from the public library.

The thought of starting such a long book started me thinking... How many pages do you give a book before you put it down and write it off as just "not for me"? The librarian's librarian, Nancy (Book Lust) Pearl, once gave this advice on NPR: Read 50 pages and if it hasn't grabbed you by then, give up. Unless you are over 50 years old. Then subtract your age from 100 and give up at that page number. (I can stop reading at page 44 now.) She opined that time becomes more valuable the less we have of it, so no use using those last few breaths reading something that doesn't grab you. Good point.

Is there a classic book you know you should like and have started a number of times but just can't get into? Catch 22 is that book for me. I want to like it, but I always give up.

Seth Godin in Revinventing the Kindle (part II) writes that e-books should change the reading experience:

8. Allow all-you-can-eat subscriptions if the author or publisher wants to provide it. Let me buy every book Seth has written, or all the business books I can handle, or "up to ten books a week." Remember, the marginal cost of a book is now the cost of the bandwidth to deliver it, so buffets make economic sense.

Just think of a Netflix for books. Just one of several interesting ideas about making reading more social as it becomes more digital Godin writes about.

I still can't get my head around how libraries will handle circulating digital books - or if they ever will. The whole economic raison d'etre for libraries - that it is cheaper to buy one book and share it than buy a book for every individual - isn't vaild when books, like songs, get down to a few cents a piece. And they will. The cost of cataloging, staffing, housing and delivering a print book - even if shared - would probably be more than just giving all citizens a voucher for all the books they could read. OK, I know it's not that simple.

Or is it?

Mystery readers

Cool idea from one our high school library media specialists:

Volunteer "mystery readers" needed!

In honor of I Love to Read month, [the principal] has graciously allowed us to start SSR time for 3 Fridays with a mystery reader.

What does a mystery reader do?

Read over the intercom for no more than one minute at the start of SSR. If you have a particular well-known (or not-so-well-known) paragraph, you may provide your own. If you think you would need help with a selection, I have a few available. Just email me if you'd like to be a reader. ...

How and why should classes participate?

The mystery reader will only read for a minute or so. After the reader is done, the class should decide who the reader is and what they just read. There might even be a prize for most (appropriately) creative answer! It would probably work best for the teacher to email me the answers. The classes who are correct will be announced in the bulletin on Monday, plus they will go into a drawing for a prize to be given the following week.

Please help us promote reading this month by participating in this fun low-stress event!

Were I a mystery reader, this would be my paragraph - the best one ever written IMHO:

When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills, where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream would have no way to get in. Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

An entire love story in a single paragraph.

Your favorite paragraph?

Little bunny books - reading despite school

As I remember the story, grandson Paul came home one day from first grade and declared that he didn't like to read anymore. Coming from a "reading" family, this wasn't received particularly well. A little investigation by his parents discovered what Paul really didn't like was reading the required materials in the reading series. He called them "little bunny stories." The happy ending is that Paul's parents visited the library and bookstore and found books more suited to his reading interests. Mostly Dave Pilkey Captain Underpants books (that his grandfather enjoys as well).

I'm thinking of this bit of family lore as I read Kelly Gallagher's e-book, Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. [Thanks so much for the head's up about this book from Dr. Joyce at the NeverEnding Search where she includes a lot of other really good information about the book as well.]

Gallagher defines:

Read-i-cide:noun, the systematic killing of the love ofreading, often
exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools

and suggests that

...rather than helping students, many of the reading practices found in today’s classrooms are actually contributing to the death of reading. In an earnest attempt to instill reading, teachers and administrators push practices that kill many students’ last chance to develop into lifelong readers.

Gallagher offers solutions to schools creating alliterate graduates - one of which is reading for fun. I wish the author had a more positive view of libraries - he insists that classroom libraries best serve kids. This is something the profession needs to work on - emphasizing the school library's role in creating classroom-housed collections.

I often wonder just how much I would read if I was permitted to read only a certain number of pages per day (NO READING AHEAD), only could read things that were interesting to female elementary teachers female elementary teachers - who haven't read any new children's literature possibly since they finished their college children's lit class but even more likely, since they were in elementary or middle school themselves -  assigned, and on which I had to complete worksheets. Is it any wonder why video games look good to kids?

Paul's story had a happy ending despite his school, not because of his school. Paul didn't like reading at the time because he was a good reader, not because he was a poor reader. How sad is it that for all those children who don't come from such superior genetic stock that schools are not helping struggling readers and destroying successful ones?

Share this book, along with Krashen's Power of Reading, 2nd edition, with reading specialists, teachers and parents. But only if you care if the next generation reads more than chat boxes.