It’s only a matter of time before VIP stroller sections and sippy cup service pop up in New York City’s libraries.
With toddler story time at public libraries becoming so popular, parents and nannies are showing up nearly an hour in advance to wait on lengthy lines, according to The Wall Street Journal
In 2013, 250,000 people attended story time in the public libraries throughout Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Nearly 190,000 came in the first quarter of this year alone.
In Brooklyn, 3,800 read-alouds entertained more than 100,000 people last year. The count is already at 4,400 sessions serving more than 125,000 for 2014.
“We could offer story-time programs 24 hours a day and we would have attendance,” Rachel Payne, who coordinates the early-childhood programs for Brooklyn’s public libraries, told The Journal.
With the large turnouts, librarians are now doubling as bouncers and valets, managing stroller spaces and making sure adults behave in line.
“We don’t want the [children] hearing adults yelling and pushing first thing in the morning,” Juana Flores, a children’s librarian in Brooklyn, told the paper.
While parents attempt to skip the line by having friends secure tickets, librarians have begun using a color-coded ticketing system.
They’ve also started to offer up to three back-to-back readings per morning, some starting before the library officially opens.
“I put a sign on the door that says: ‘Ring the bell for the 10:30 story time,’” Thea Taube, a librarian at the Ottendorfer Branch told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s like a speakeasy.”
Twenty "Little Free Libraries" have already been
constructed around the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
DALLAS, May 19 (UPI) --All around Dallas, mini-libraries
resembling large mailboxes or outdoor cabinets are popping up for residents to
use. The concept is a simple one, need a book, take a book; have a book, leave a
book.
The literacy effort, called Libros Libres or Little Free Libraries, is
organized by the Wisconsin nonprofit that carries the same name, Big Thought,
bcWORKSHOP and the Dallas Public Library. Cheerios is also a significant donor
and sponsor
"Literacy is so important at that early age, and if we don't have that, we're
all in trouble in a big way," co-founder of Little Free Libraries Todd Bol told the Dallas Morning News.
His organization started out with three Little Free Libraries around Dallas
before Saturday, when residents came together to build an additional 17.
"This is a tight-knit community," local YMCA youth development director
Jamonica Washington said.
"People are proud of their neighborhood. The Little
Free Library is only going to help that."
The organizations are currently soliciting donations and generating buzz via
an ongoing IndieGoGo campaign.
If
you're on the hunt for something new and interesting to read, you have plenty of
places to turn. This week, we're looking at five of the best book recommendation
sites, services, or groups, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the
week, we asked you where you went to find something good to
read—whether it's based on the things you've already read, someone's
suggestions you trust, a website that lets you build a virtual "shelf" of your
favorite titles, or just a discussion group. You responded with tons of great
ideas, but we only have room for the top five. Here's what you said, in no
particular order:
S
GoodReads is more
than just a book recommendation site, although it excels at helping your find
new books to read based on the ones you enjoy. You can build a virtual "shelf"
of books you own or have already read, share your progress with the books you're
currently reading, rate the books you've read, leave reviews, and connect with
other readers. You can also use those ratings to get book suggestions from the
site's massive database of books. Your friends can make direct suggestions to
you, and even if the book suggestions that the site builds aren't enough, you
can go diving into user-generated book lists, reviews, and more.
One great thing
that many of you mentioned about GoodReads is that you can connect your Amazon
account to quickly build your virtual shelf. As you finish books on your Kindle,
GoodReads will automatically mark the book as complete and update your
recommendations accordingly. It's also hard to understate the power of
GoodReads' community, which many of you called out as well. Some of you noted
that your favorite authors actively use the service too, and they share what
they're reading as well. Read more in its
nomination thread here.
While BookBub isn't
strictly a book recommendation service, it does bring you super-low-cost books based on your interests every day. The
service is free, and when you sign up, you tell BookBub what kinds of books you
like to read. From there, you'll get an email from BookBub every day (you can
choose whether it comes in the morning or evening) with book deals for that day.
When we say "deal," we mean it—many of BookBub's titles are free entirely,
$0.99, or just a couple of bucks. In some cases, they're new titles that the
author is trying to get momentum behind, and in other cases they're just great,
under-the-radar titles you might not have discovered otherwise.
I've been a BookBub
member for a year now, and the book suggestions run the gamut from extremely
useful, amazing finds to horribly pulpy "how did this even get published" genre
titles. Your mileage may vary, but the nice thing is that you can tweak your
selections at any time, and the books are always cheap. When those great titles
come along, you'll have to jump on them though—the sales go quickly. Read more
in its
nomination thread here.
LibraryThing has
been around for a long time (and it made the top five, along with GoodReads, the
last time we asked for your favorite book rec sites) and is still a great
user-powered book ratings, review, and recommendation site. The service calls
itself the world's largest book club, and that's a lot like the overall feel.
Once you sign up, you'll be encouraged to start adding books you've read and
leave reviews for them. Behind its book ratings and reviews though, LibraryThing
is a powerful tool to catalog and organize your entire book collection. It
doesn't take much to add all of the books in your library so you have a running
collection of both your physical books and ebooks all in one place. The service
will also connect to your Amazon account to automatically pull down books you
own and have read.
Thanks to its
massive community, its book recommendations are often spot on, reflective of
users who have libraries like yours and have rated books the way you have. The
basic service is free, and you can add up to 200 books. $10/yr or $25/one time
gets you a premium membership that lets you add and catalog as many books as you
like. Those of you who nominated it noted that its especially good for people
who enjoy non-fiction or books that aren't necessarily in the popular zeitgeist,
and for getting recommendations from people who don't just list the same dozen
titles over and over again. Read more in its
nomination thread here.
If you're a Reddit
fan, the /r/booksuggestions subreddit is a great place to go to see what
everyone's reading, or to get recommendations based on specific authors or
titles you've enjoyed, or see what people suggest in specific genres. Some of
the top threads are community challenges and calls for recommendations on a
specific theme, but it doesn't take much scrolling to find interesting threads
for people looking for specific types of books. One person is bedtime books for their kids that combine epic battles with strong
female characters, another person is interested in science fiction titles without aliens or looming galactic
threats. The sky's the limit, and you can just as easily post your own topic
with what you're looking for.
Those of you who
called it out in the call for contenders praised the subreddit for being equally
weird and interesting, a label often applied to Reddit in general. You'll
definitely find something new and interesting to read, that much is true,
although often the most broad recommendations do sometimes tend to follow what's
popular and in the common consciousness. Still, if you refine your thread as
much as possible and include what you've read and what you're looking for,
you're in for good tips. Read more in
its nomination thread here.
If you're not
interested in registering for accounts, adding your own books, or any of that
hassle, Olmenta can suggest some solid titles to you based on general popularity
and the curation of the people behind the site. It's a simple tiled list of book
covers that the service thinks you should read, and a few genres you can click
on if you're looking for something specific, like business, fiction, children's,
theatre, poetry, or nonfiction, among others. If you see a book you might be
interested in, click on it for a synopsis and a bigger view of the cover, along
with a link to buy the book.
Olmenta couldn't be
any simpler—but it's a double-edged sword. You'll see what's available quickly,
and if you like the suggestions, you'll come back to see updates and new reads.
If you don't, there's not much else for you to see. Olmenta's nomination thread
reflected that simplicity—you noted that it's hassle-free and elegant, and you
don't need to jump through hoops to find a new book. At the same time, the lack
of customization means the suggestions aren't really personalized. Read more in
its
nomination thread here.
The honorable
mentions this week go out to Your local library or indie
bookstore. A number of you noted that there's nothing wrong with
heading to your local library and asking a librarian what to read—after all,
they're the most familiar with their own stacks, and have plenty of suggestions,
tips, and thoughts of their own to offer you. Whether you're looking for some
new, hot title or you want to dive into more obscure areas of literature, you
shouldn't overlook your local library, and the hard-working, highly-trained
people that work there.
Similarly, many of
you suggested heading to your local independent bookstore, especially if you're
looking for niche or specialty books on highly specific topics. Looking for
books on specifically political topics, or independently published authors whose
books are on limited release? Indie bookstores are where you need to go—and the
people that work there are likely to have suggestions for you too. I remember my
days working in a bookstore: Each of us had a specialty area we were happy to
talk about.
The Hive
Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your
favorite was left out, it didn't get the nominations required in the call for
contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity
contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Reading group in the library of Wandsworth Prison, in south London, in 2012. Photograph: Martin Godwin
The ban on sending books to
prisoners has been causing a big stir among publishers, authors and the public.
While the condemnations
of the changes introduced by justice secretary Chris Grayling continue to pour
in, we
turned to our readers to ask what books they would give to someone in
prison, and we had some very touching and interesting responses from people
talking from direct experience. We asked them to tell us more about literature
and its relationship to incarceration, as well as the troubles they went to to
get access to books during their time inside. Here are some of their
stories:
"The act of reading for eight - ten hours a day was one of absolute
bliss"
Aaron Persichetti, 29 On the experience of incarceration:
I'm an American, Pittsburgh born. I'm rather rapidly approaching my 30th
year. I was incarcerated in the Harris County jail (the largest jail in the city
of Houston) for six weeks as a result of drink-driving (actually a serious crime
that I do in fact regret) and possession of cannabis (not so serious and I've
yet to feel a pang of guilt). We were housed in a concrete dormitory, between
30-35 guys per dorm, and we were segregated by our age (I was 19 at the time and
thus was housed with 17-21 year olds). I did not see the sun for 40 some odd
days, as we were not allowed outside.
On books read in prison:
As far as books were concerned, there was a heap of awful dime-store
paperbacks, mostly genre fiction of the worst kind, i.e. very, very poor science
fiction (no Asimov or Gibson), dystopian dreck (no Atwood or Mitchell), and
dated political thrillers (not a fan anyway). When I think back, it occurs to me
that the vast majority of the books on offer dated from the late 70s to early
80s (no classics).
In the end, I found a copy of The Hunt for Red October and I lost count of
the number of times I read that book, probably five or six times (ironic that I
don't fancy political fiction and yet that was what I read the most). Even
though I wasn't that keen about the books offered, I ate them up as if they were
caviar.
Not to take anything away from the late Mr. Clancy, but the book itself
didn't do much for me. The act of reading for 8-10 hours a day however was one
of absolute bliss; I only wish I had had all seven volumes of Proust. A downside
of being in jail, as opposed to prison, is that people are not allowed to
receive packages, hence no one could send me anything to read.
Tom Clancy...author of The Hunt for Red October. Photograph: MCT/Landov/Barcroft Media
On literature, hope and change:
The literature I was reading didn't really change me, but the act of reading
taught me how to cope with the time. Time is a river, and in jail/prison it
moves at the rate of molasses (the metaphor is not mine). And it also taught me
how much I love books, even the bad ones. As perverse as this sounds, I would do
the time again if only I could select what books were available.
Literature serves a person well in prison, though it may take time to develop
one's reading ability (by that I simply mean that reading for long periods at a
time requires practice). I would emphasise that literature (reading in general)
requires patience, and a patient person can overcome just about anything, even
prison. Just ask Edmond Dantès.
"I still have that battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo with my
prison number written"
Anonymous, 26 On the experience of incarceration:
I was in Fleury Merogis, outside Paris for six months in 2008. It's the
prison featured in the recent French film A Prophet. It was a little tough
because I didn't speak a lot of French and there was only a handful of English
speakers. However, I got a job in a factory sticking the free extras onto
magazines. You know: perfume and shampoo samples, little hair clips, toys and
colouring pencils on kids' publications. Working was good because it got you out
of the cell, kept your mind busy, gave you a bit of pocket money and there was
always a bit of banter on the factory floor.
Us workers lived on a separate wing of the prison and at the end of the day
we got to walk in the yard for an hour, and the atmosphere in the workers' yard
tended to be a little more subdued and civilised than in the yards of the wings
where the inmates chose not to work. There were still gangs and fights of
course, but people were generally more respectful to one another. On the books read in prison:
I wasn't allowed to receive anything from outside and I didn't have access to
the library. I was on a waiting list, although I have no idea how long that list
was or how many people were allowed membership at one time. I knew a Bulgarian
guy who had access to the library though, and he lent me War of the Worlds when
he was finished with it. I quite enjoyed that, although it's not really the sort
of thing I'd usually read. I also read The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa,
which I had had on me when I was arrested but hadn't started and had been
allowed to keep.
The other books I remember reading were translations of The Count of Monte
Cristo and Papillon. Again, neither of these books are things I feel I would
have been usually drawn to, but I enjoyed them both immensely. Funnily enough
they're both French books involving prison breaks, and although written almost a
century apart, they're both out and out adventures full of hope and redemption,
which is lovely to read about when you're in prison.
Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the film of Papillon. Photograph: REX/Everett Collection
I borrowed those books from the only other British guy on my wing, a
middle-aged guy from the North West of England, although they came to me
indirectly from an old Dutch gangster who'd been borrowing them first. They'd
been sent in by the English guy's girlfriend and were well worn by the time they
got to me. Their spines were cracked in several places and their covers were
soft and curled, but that added to their charm. I felt privileged that it was my
turn to accompany Papillon and Edmond Dantès on their long, exciting quests for
freedom.
On literature, hope and change:
I bought a cheap radio with the first pay I got from my job in the factory
and I was allowed to rent a small TV for my room when I started earning enough
each week. Although I couldn't understand much French I enjoyed watching the odd
film and – like the vast majority of us in there – I couldn't wait for those
Tuesday and Wednesday nights when a European football match would be on. Almost
every cell would have the game on the TV or radio and when goals went in the
whole prison would erupt and shake with the noise of shouting and chanting, cell
doors being banged and some inmates would throw burning balls of paper through
the bars of their windows which, if enough people did it, lit up the sky like
some kind of strange slow motion firework display.
But on a regular evening reading was the thing. Ultimately, nobody wanted to
be there and for me a good book was simply the best escapism. But I've always
felt that good literature makes real life more interesting and beautiful too,
and it was a time when I needed that more than ever.
I still have that battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo with my friend's
name and prison number written on the inside the cover. I got released suddenly
and unexpectedly and didn't get a chance to give it back, or pass it onto
whoever was the next in line.
I feel sad and outraged to think that British prisoners might not get the
chance to read a good book anymore. It seems unnecessarily cruel and
inhumane.
"Reading 1984 was a big mistake"
William Tea, 49 On the experience of incarceration:
I was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed robbery and was sentenced to
three years' imprisonment when I was 24 years old. I spent a total of fourteen
and a half months in prison in the UK. I spent time in five high-security and
one open prison. Since my release I have lived and worked in a large number of
countries. Broadly speaking, I have been involved in "prison welfare" work in
the UK, Germany and Australia. I have sent many, many different kinds of books
and "publications" to prisoners with whom I have corresponded over the
years. On the books read in prison:
My least favourite was 1984. I read it in the remand wing of Wormwood Scrubs
prison and that was a BIG mistake. The literary equivalent of music to cut your
wrists to. In Wandsworth prison, where I would otherwise have been happy to read
the graffiti on the walls, I tried reading a Jackie Collins book and couldn’t do
it. I tried a few times but the Hollywood society that it described was such a
spiritual and moral vacuum that, even compared to my current surroundings, I
felt disgusted by it and had to put it down.
Like many prisoners I discovered The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and it was Dave,
a career criminal and incorrigible armed robber, who recommended that to me. He
also recommended the radio play of Les Miserables on Radio 4. I don’t think I
could have managed to read the whole book at that time, but Dave the armed
robber’s recommendation brought me to Victor Hugo.
I read Caesar’s Gallic Wars. That made a huge impact on me. The idea that
Julius Caesar had written these words two thousand years before and I could just
get them from the library and at least this brightness was not denied to me, was
almost too much to bear. I studied Sociology, so I read Durkheim, Marx and
conflict theorists. Sociological theory gave me tools to understand the workings
of society that I had only seen in a mirror dimly up to then. It helped me to
make sense of why the Queen’s cousin was in the same place as me and one of the
(many) sons of the King of Saudi Arabia was two buildings along.
I read the Bible quite a bit when I was first on remand. A quiet Nun brought
them around for those who wanted them. I was moved by the incredible spirit of
love and devotion that shone from her every step. She was the only religious
visitor who refused to carry a key. She never once locked the gates on us and
she was always just as locked in as we were. On literature, hope and change:
I would say all of them gave me hope. I’d loved Oscar Wilde from when I was a
child. Reading the Ballad of Reading Gaol gave me a feeling of kinship with him.
It also helped me to remember that a sane person would have to find a prison as
monstrous as I did. It told me that I was not insane and that there was hope
that others I would respect would see it the same way. It gave me
hope.
Hope bringer … Oscar Wilde, in 1882.
Photograph: Jerry Tavin/Lehtikuva
What I loved the most was Homer’s Odyssey. Knowledge of "the classics",
cultural capital was held so tightly by the intellectual class as a bulwark to
justify their privilege, that it seemed to me, being a prisoner, an outcast
among outcasts, daring to read those books and eat from the fruit of the tree of
knowledge was an act of silent rebellion. I was working 12 hour days most of the
time, and the lights were switched off at 10pm. so strangely, I didn’t have much
time for reading. But I read all I could to expand my brain.
In the prison library I found a book on ‘Data Processing’. Reading it was
like trying to drink an IT degree from a fire hose. It covered both business and
technical subjects and just about blew my head off. I struggled with many of the
concepts at first, particularly the deeper technology theory. I was completely
alone trying to master hexadecimal maths and couldn’t understand the explanation
of how they used this to compress data in computer code. I read it and read it
over and again for a couple of hours straight. Finally I had my eureka moment
when I suddenly got it and it all made sense. Literally two seconds later the
prison guard pulled the switch and I was plunged into darkness. Jubilant, but
unable to read even a sentence to confirm my understanding, I fell on my bed
laughing at the absurdity of the situation. On lessons learned:
I learned that, given the chance, literature will burst the bounds of race,
culture and class. I remember one occasion where a young man, who had been
educated by Benedictines at Ampleforth, and whose accent was more upper class
than the Queen’s, was sent in a book by his mother. He couldn’t read it, it was
too intellectual for him, so he passed on Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’
to a cockney wide-boy, a fading playboy with permed hair and a golden chain,
who’d graduated from armed robbery to being a plumber, by far the greater crime.
He read the book with great delight and passed it on with glowing
recommendations to the more studious members of our company. I saw men reading
and discussing books that I would never have dreamt of them every touching.
I am left with a raw wound of inverted snobbery against the literary elite. I
railed against the suggestions that some made to send prisoners books to help
them grow and change, to "learn from their experience" or stories that this
inexperienced people imagined would be worse than the pain the prisoners were
currently feeling and thus make them feel better. I can heartily recommend Jimmy
Boyle’s "Pain of Confinement" for an idea of why merely the state of
imprisonment is a pain that will be left in the DNA of most people who
experience it.
So I would say, send everything you can. Bird watching, chemistry, model
railways, psychic mysteries, history, let your mind run free. I was visiting
someone who was on remand in Australia. He was independently wealthy and had
ordered himself the entire back catalogue of the Nexus Magazine. He reported
that copies of the magazine were in hot demand around the high security wing of
the prison, especially the issues with detailed instructions on how to build
your own Tesla levitation device!
The best antidote I found while I was there was education and access to books
of all kinds that might bring some light into that darkness.
Clarke Peters as Othello. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
"I used to teach in a high security prison and they loved Othello"
Sandra Reston
I used to teach in a high security prison and they loved Othello – all about
misguided decisions, so it seemed apt. For me becoming a teacher was difficult
and non-conventional, so I started work at a Young Offenders Institution and
then moved to a high security prison (top of the range high security). The
prison that I taught at had two defined groups: the VP's, i.e. vulnerable
prisoners because of their crimes, sex offenders, or because they were being
bullied inside the prison; and the Mains, who were the more hardened criminals:
murderers, violent crimes, more brutal activities.
In many ways they could identify with Othello the clever man, respected and
bright who became a folly to his own failings and very much the tragic hero. It
was the latter really that captivated them: both being a hero and being tragic.
Perhaps it served as a vehicle for forgiving themselves for in many cases, their
own irrationality, their own stupidity, their own greed. Some crimes are not in
the realm of forgiveness but if one can find someone to relate to in some way
then surely it would be Othello, who was highly regarded at the outset. On literature and the experience of teaching in prison:
For the inmates literature was an escape. Not for all: for some, it was
simply a time to get together and have an active discussion about persecution,
unfairness all that is unjust in the world – a three hour session once a week to
learn, to read and to understand how language created characters and how perhaps
what they had ignored or dismissed at school made some sense.
I can confidently say I was never afraid or intimidated, and as much as it
was their journey it was mine. Sadly the number of resources was limited and one
had to very much make do with what one had and photocopy with a vengeance. I did
manage to obtain books from friends and family – sometimes by donation – and
found a very kind sales representative for a major publisher who used to give me
her samples in exchange for a bottle of wine – invariably in a Tesco car
park.
Interestingly and amusingly I can't begin to tell you of the number of times
that at social events my husband (deliberately), to liven up a situation, would
say something like "so how was it at the prison today?" which people either
found shocking or interesting. I remember one situation, when we lived in a
village, when a woman asked me what I did in the prison and when I said I was a
teacher she patronisingly asked what was the purpose if they were criminals.
This view holds in general, sadly. As a teacher in a secure institution one has
to separate oneself from what the person did and simply teach the
person.
There is a cultural narrative about how electronic
devices are pulling children away from books. When I meet with other university
professors they often tell me that the students don’t read anymore because their
eyeballs are glued to their phones. Technophobes think we are raising a
generation that doesn’t understand the value of literature.
The polarization of old and new continues. Maybe it is
leftover sediment from an anti-screen mindset that was always on the fringes of
the golden age of television. It is a trite myth-like story that attempts to
cast books as the underdog in battle against thechno-imperialism. Paper is the
good guy and Gorilla Glass is the villain.
Common Sense Media’s new report, entitled “Children,
Teens, And Reading,” attempts to offer a “big-picture perspective on children’s
reading habits in the United States and how they may have changed during the
technological revolution of recent decades.” The big scary takeaway:
According to government studies, since 1984, the
percent of 13-year-olds who are weekly readers went down from 70% to 53%, and
the percent of 17-year-olds who are weekly readers went from 64% to 40%. The
percent of 17-year-olds who never or hardly ever read tripled during this
period, from 9% to 27%.
These statistics are startling. But I’m not sure what
this has to do with technology. The framing doesn’t make much sense to me.
It seems to me that we currently live in a culture that
is more heavily text based than any other time in history. People read all day
long. Google, Twitter, and Facebook deliver words. People can’t peel their eyes
from the smartphone–essentially a text and information distribution mechanism.
We actually have trouble NOT reading. Folks are always checking their email and
their text messages. Sometimes it is hard to pull away from this matrix of
letters.
Still, what are people reading? It seems like they
don’t read many books. I’m not talking about kids, but rather adults. Even the
technophobes don’t read books.
I’ve met highly educated elite individuals who have
told me they just don’t have time to read books. They skim the NY Times book
review so they can participate in cocktail party conversations. They buy
executive summaries from the back of in-flight magazines. I’m shocked by the
number of people who ask me if there are audio versions of my books
available.
Is the problem that kids don’t read books, or is the
problem that nobody reads books because our culture has become anti-academic and
anti-intellectual? We’d prefer to read magazines and blogs that are subtly
self-promotional in their incessant questioning the value of the humanities,
liberal arts education, and those university degrees that are more dependent on
books than algorithms and databases. The popular rhetoric tells us we need more
STEM education, more engineers, more entrepreneurs. We’re surrounded by an
implicit anti-book agenda, and still we wonder why kids don’t read books.
I’ll admit that I’m biased. I’m an academic. I get
paid to read. But my kids (6 and 8) also read a lot on their own. Not only
because I require it–30 minutes of reading is a prerequisite to video game
time–but also because their dad models good reading behaviors. Dad is always
ordering new books; dad is always reading them. In my household, being an adult
means feeling comfortable with books. Maturity means having excessive
familiarity with long-form written word.
The Common Sense Media report agrees. “Parents can
encourage reading,” they explain, “by keeping print books in the home, reading
themselves, and setting aside time daily for their children to read.”
Strong correlations exist between these parental
actions and the frequency with which children read (scholastic, 2013). For
example, among children who are frequent readers, 57% of parents set aside time
each day for their child to read, compared to 16% of parents of children who are
infrequent readers.
When it comes to books, however, most studies show
that the text delivery method is irrelevant. Good reading behavior has nothing
to do with technology. E-readers, tablets, laptop screens are all capable of
delivering long-form text. Books have nothing to do with paper. In fact,
electronic devices only increase access to books. A report from the Joan Ganz
Cooney Center released earlier this year explains that “a majority of children
ages 2 to 10 have access to a device for electronic reading: 55% have a
multipurpose tablet in the home, and 29% have a dedicated e-reader (62% have
access to at least one of these devices). Among children with one of these
devices in the home, half (49%) engage in electronic reading, either on their
own or with their parent (30% of all children).” Books matter; how kids read
them doesn’t.
My kids read on the iPad, the e-reader, and paper. I
make sure of it. I read to my kids every night. I read with my kids during the
day. I do it because I see it as a crucial piece of their education. I can’t
just outsource the raising of my children to specialists–and then complain that
those teachers are failing. It is obvious to me that parents also need to be
involved. They need to make sure their children read books.
Of course, it is easier to frame the story as paper
vs. digital. It gives us permission not to engage with our kids. We can blame
the video games and apps rather than blaming ourselves. Parents need to take
responsibility for raising thoughtful, empathic, open-minded adults. Books are a
crucial part of the equation. But even if we eliminated every digital technology
from our lives, our kids still won’t read books unless we tell them in no
uncertain terms that books are an important part of being an adult.
Teach your kids to
read. And teach your kids that it matters what they read. Renaissance Learning’s
annual “What Kids Are Reading Report” tells us a lot about what kids
are currently reading and it is not all pretty. Their huge study “does not
summarize sales or library data. It uses data from 318 million books read by 9.8
million students in the U.S. to determine what the most popular books are in a
given year. It is the most extensive report in the U.S. that reflects K12
reading trends.”
Three interesting findings:
1. Gendered reading starts as early as first grade.
Elementary-school boys read tons of “Captain Underpants,” but it doesn’t even
make it to the girls’ top 20 list. We’re conditioned to read statistics like
this as proof that girls and boys have different preferences, tastes, and
attitudes. I don’t believe it. Alternatively, we might read this as evidence
that we are creating an increasingly gendered world where roles and intellectual
expectations are divided according to biological reproductive organs. If this is
really what you want, by all means, keep at it. If not, there are plenty of
books that are non-gendered; let your kids know that you think more highly of
these.
2. Middle schoolers (in particular 6th graders) are reading the
most words per student. The average words per student increases through
middle school and then starts decreasing again in high school. I see this as
evidence that parents are sending the wrong message about books to their
children. We value literacy, cheering on small kids to learn to read as quickly
as possible. But when these kids become adolescents they attempt to directly
emulate their adult role models. If adults don’t read books then trying to act
like an adult means not reading books.
3. Books like Twilight and Hunger Games are
more popular than literary classics. These days, teachers assign these more
often than Shakespeare or Don Quixote. Most of them will
tell you that it is because they figure any reading is good reading and books
like these increase student engagement. On the one hand, this makes sense. On
the other hand, we should remember that popular fiction prioritizes sales over
content. They are revenue generators first and literary explorations of the
human condition only afterward. This doesn’t necessarily mean popular fiction is
bad, but there’s also a reason that certain books have transcended the economic,
political, and epistemological trends of particular centuries.
At the end of the day, how our children read and what our
children read says a lot more about adult attitudes about books than it does
about the kids’. Model the behaviors and attitudes you want your children to
emulate.
Interracial relationships are a hot new trend in love lit
by: Andrea Sachs
“It wasn’t as though I started out to write a book about an interracial couple,” says Kristan Higgins, the bestselling romance-novel author. She just needed to conjure up the appropriate hunk, er, man for Colleen O’Rourke, the Irish-American heroine of her sizzling new book, Waiting on You. “As I was developing this character,” she says, “I was picturing him. He was tall, dark, handsome, and very romantic. Before I was really aware of it, I had him as Latino.” Lucas Campbell was born, and the pairing was combustible:
So you’re here,” she said, “and I’m here, and obviously we’ll run into each other now and again.” “Yes.” “You look good, Spaniard,” she said. “The years have been kind.” His eyes smiled. His face didn’t move; it was like a magic trick or something, the way he could smile like that. Those dark, dark Latin eyes. Lucas never said too much, but his eyes did.”
Publishers are taking heed, as well they might: readers vote with their wallets. Romance fiction brought in a cool $1.4 billion in 2012, making Love Lit the largest sector of the U.S. book-buying market. Says Dianne Moggy, the heads of editorial series at Harlequin, the world’s largest romance publisher, “We have more and more authors and readers who have either African American backgrounds, Latino, Chinese, Indian in terms of Asia, South Pacific and certainly Native American.” As Moggy says proudly, “We’re just seeing reality reflected in our books.”Higgins’ casting is right in line with the zeitgeist. Devotees of romance fiction, predominantly female, are demanding that their favorite category be ethnically as diverse as the real world. One of the newest branches of the popular genre is interracial romance, which just a few decades ago would have been too hot to handle. After all, the first African-American romance imprint came on the scene less than 20 years ago. “Readers are able to say through social media and direct interaction, ‘I want to see myself in a romance,’ and not every romance reader is white,” says critic Sarah Wendell, author of Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels.
Covers have always been uniquely important in selling romance novels—witness the steamy “clinch covers” of passionately entwined lovers. The covers are also a social barometer. In the 1980s, some U.S. retailers refused to sell romance fiction with African Americans on the cover, much less interracial covers. The latter are now showing up with more frequency, though they are still considered too edgy by a few retailers.
“Most of the people I know who are writing interracials are African American,” says Beverly Jenkins, a trailblazing author who has written 30 African-American historical romances. She cites such like-minded authors as Kimberly Kaye Terry, Michelle Monkou, Sienna Mynx and Yvette Hines. So why are these writers so attuned to love that crosses ethnic barriers? “I think because love is love and romance writers, we pride ourselves on writing stories that resonate with our readers,” Jenkins says. “And if you look at the changing demographics of the United States, there are a whole lot of mixed marriages out there.”
The latest Census figures bear her out. Interracial married couple households grew by 28% from 2000 to 2010, to an all-time high. One of every 10 married couples in the US identified themselves as mixed race or multi-ethnic. More than four in 10 Americans say that that is a change for the better, according to a Pew Research Center study last year. This change in social acceptance has come at blinding speed; it was only in 1967 that the Supreme Court found laws prohibiting interracial marriages unconstitutional.
There are people who are still not anxious to hear this message. As recently as last winter, a Super Bowl TV ad for Cheerios that featured a family with a black father and a white mother evoked an ugly response from some viewers, followed by a supportive public counter response. But the company doubled down this year with an ad showing the same family; this time, the mother was pregnant.
No one knows more about how times have changed than bestselling romance author Kimberly Kaye Terry. Ten years ago, when she wrote her first book, an interracial novel, she had an editor at a big publishing house tell her, “I love it, but can you make the characters the same race? Pick a race, any race, but make them the same.” But Terry stuck to her guns, and has since written over 20 interracial romance novels for major publishers. “That’s what I do, and my readers love it,” she says with pride. But, she is quick to add, “the focus is absolutely never on the race. That’s not sexy. Let it be about anything but the color of their skin, because to me, that’s archaic thinking. We do not live in the ’50s.”
When I was 10, I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for the first time. I felt an immediate kinship to Jo March, the willful second daughter who dreams of becoming a novelist one day, as I also loved to write (plays, screenplays, short stories, elementary school musings on any scrap of paper I could find) and was the second of four girls in a family that observed my scribbling in an amused sort of way but did not understand me.
Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868 at the behest of her publisher, Robert Brothers, who wanted her to write a book specifically "for girls.” At first, she was reluctant to do so, writing in her journal that she “never liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters … our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting though I doubt it.”
Flash-forward to 2014: Not only is Little Women still being read by adolescents and adults the world over, but young adult literature—buzz-worded as “YA,” a genre written, published, and marketed to that pivotal 12-18 demographic—is booming.
Currently, we are riding the crest of that wave. YA literature’s seemingly cemented status at the top of bestseller lists, Amazon pre-orders and box office records prove that the genre is not onlylucrative, but also embraced by an audience wider than just teens and pre-teens. Expert Michael Cart calls the 2000s “the second golden age of young adult fiction,” and the numbers would appear to prove him right.
So, how did a long-derided genre gain such widespread credibility? It’s easy to forget now, but past generations haven’t always taken the young adult novel so seriously.
Yes, novels with young protagonists have been around since the dawn of the printing press, but a more intentional marketing strategy for enticing teen readers was not established until the mid-20th century.
The term “young adult” was coined by the Young Adult Library Services Association during the 1960s to represent the 12-18 age range they hoped to engage, and for a while, these teen-targeted books were hot sellers.
What Cart calls “the first golden age” of YA literature is associated with popular teen-novel authors of the 1970s: Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, and Robert Cormier. Their books, for the most part, are centered around the high school experience: the exquisite pain of being misunderstood.
However, once these books devolved into “single problem novels,” teens tired of the formulaic stories and turned to other pockets of genre fiction, such as horror (R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series) and soapy high drama (Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High). Of course, there were a few exceptions, like 1983’s The Outsiders, but the market for YA novels in the the late ’80s and early ’90s was tepid at best.
Post-Harry Potter, which ended its record-breaking run with the publication of the seventh and final book in 2007, YA literature is still a billion-dollar industry, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
In addition to YA series like Divergent and The Hunger Games still rolling out films into 2015, many more are in the works, including James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, Gayle Forman’s If I Stay andPaper Towns, another book-to-film adaptation from The Fault in Our Stars author/Internet sensation John Green.
Perhaps better than asking why YA is such a lucrative market (answer: appeal to target audience, cash in, repeat) is to turn the question inward. Why are we drawn to the same conventions recycled over and over again—the supernatural romances, the kids with cancer, the dystopian future action trilogies—and when will we tire of them?
Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a young adult author with a Ph.D. in cognitive science, believes that teens in particular are drawn to paranormal or dystopian novels because of the connections they draw to their inner turmoil.
"Just like adolescence is between childhood and adulthood, paranormal, or other, is between human and supernatural," said Barnes. "Teens are caught between two worlds, childhood and adulthood, and in YA, they can navigate those two worlds and sometimes dualities of other worlds."
YA naysayers, on the other hand, are sick of the recycled cliches and conventions, perceiving the current trend of YA mania to be indicative of a fall in literacy, not a rise. I can understand where they’re coming from, to an extent, as the entirety of the Twilightsaga and about 75 percent of The Fault in Our Stars could be used to bolster the latter point.
Others ask whether we need a niche market in the first place. Why should we pander to teens and pre-teens by making a “young adult” category just for them, when many, if not most, are capable of reading The Sun Also Rises or Wuthering Heights? Are we just pigeonholing young people in the most condescending way possible, dividing up sections at Barnes & Noble or subcategories on Amazon by books “for teens” and books for everyone else?
For me, reading YA novels did serve as a gateway to “the greats.” For example, reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda at age 11 inspired me to read all of the classic novels that the eponymous heroine herself read—Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, The Grapes of Wrath,and so on— before my 18th birthday. But I also contend that books with the YA label can be classics too, and many, Matilda included, are truly great in their own right.
Perhaps the best young adult novels (which for me would also include Harriet the Spy, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Phantom Tollbooth, and the Harry Potter series, to name a few) are the ones that you can return to at any age and peel back new layers that you weren’t able to see at 12 or at 16. They speak to an adolescent’s heightened state of reality, but also to the feelings that often come flooding back in adult life, and still ring true.
I finally feel like a “young adult” at 25. I certainly didn’t feel like an adult, young or otherwise, at 12 or 16 or even at the start of college, when I was legally deemed one.
As Barnes described, I felt as if I was torn between two worlds: one foot in childhood, and the other in a strange, uncertain future.
Marketing a book as “YA” is essentially making a beeline for the publishing industry’s most lucrative demographic. But if young people enjoy reading them, and are inspired to pick up more books as result, then what’s the harm in that?
A good YA author never writes down to his or her audience, as I have found to be true with countless authors whose books I read throughout my adolescence and continue to enjoy as an adult. And if these novels are instilling a love of literature at an early age, I wonder how a YA resurgence could be seen as anything less than a positive development.
Overall, I believe that adults do a disservice to younger generations when underestimating or discrediting their abilities—thinking that because they’re young, they must lack the intelligence and depth of feeling necessary to grasp complex literary themes—when the reality is quite the contrary.
As Madeleine L’Engle once said, “If a book will be too difficult for grown-ups, write it for children.”
Let pundits blame technology for distracting us from great books. Ordinary readers are rediscovering the classics
by: Laura Miller
A couple of years ago, the critic Maud Newton was sitting in a New York City subway train peering at her iPhone. A fellow passenger standing nearby began ranting to his companion about how, instead of reading books, all anyone ever does anymore is waste time with their smartphones. “I was reading Bertrand Russell’s ‘The History of Western Philosophy’ on my phone at the time,” Newton told me. “It was soooo annoying but also so funny.”
Although you’d never know it from the media attention devoted to tablet computers like the iPad and dedicated e-reader devices like the Kindle, a third of all cellphone owners choose to read e-books on their phones — which is a lot of people, given that over 90 percent of American adults have cellphones. Those who enjoy wringing their hands in Spenglerian despair whenever they see heads bent over glossy black rectangles in public might want to check their pessimism. For all you know, those smartphone devotees are reveling in the fruits of Western Civilization — rather than playing Flappy Bird while it crumbles around them.
Smartphones, even more than tablets and e-readers, have fostered a new type of reading, sometimes called “interstitial” reading. It’s the chapters, pages and paragraphs snatched up during those scraps of time that might once have been squandered on People magazine or just staring off into space. Interstitial reading happens while people are sitting in waiting rooms and the backs of taxis or standing at bus stops and in line for movie tickets or at the DMV.
As un-ideal as such circumstances sound for absorbing a serious or challenging book, many smartphone owners are choosing to spend this salvaged time on literary classics. Books by such authors as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are in the public domain and therefore free, tempting the harried and time-strapped with the opportunity to catch up on the books they missed in college. The journalist Clive Thompson, author of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” was an English major, but one so preoccupied with drama and poetry that he reached his early 40s without reading many classic novels. Several years ago, his wife suggested he attempt “Middlemarch,” but when he picked up a copy in a bookstore, “I knew exactly what would happen. It’s a mammoth book. I’d buy it, I’d read two chapters and it would be such pain in the butt to carry it around I’d stop reading it.”
So Thompson decided to read a copy of George Eliot’s sweeping novel of provincial English life that he’d downloaded onto his phone from Project Gutenberg, figuring that way, he’d always have it with him. “What I discovered is that if it’s a really amazing book, it doesn’t really matter what I’m reading it on. I get sucked into it. And ‘Middlemarch’ is just fantastic.” The ability to read without having to turn on a light proved a particular boon. An insomniac, Thompson can take in a chapter or two in the middle of the night without waking his wife and, when his children were small, “they wanted me to lie down next to them as they fell asleep, so I’d read in the dark next to them. They’d fall asleep and I’d go on reading for an hour.” So far, Thompson has read, among other titles, “War and Peace,” “Moby-Dick,” “Paradise Lost” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” on his phone. He’s reading Proust now, and plans to try “Infinite Jest” after that. “There’s no way I would have read these works of literature without having the phone,” he told me.
Several Salon readers offered to share with me their experiences of reading books on their phones. Like Thompson, most of them say it’s the convenience, portability and constant accessibility of their phones that makes interstitial reading possible. Catelyn May of Atlanta, Georgia, works in sales and often finds herself unexpectedly stuck in waiting rooms and in need of something good to read, preferably a classic. Another Atlantean, Will Young, used to carry two books with him when taking the train to work, in case he finished one before he arrived at his destination. “That could be quite a lot of extra weight before I bought my smartphone.”
Emory King, a business analyst, belongs to four (!) book groups, a commitment that makes it essential to read whenever he can: “during breaks at work, over lunch, when riding in cars and so on. At first I tried to carry copies of the books around with me. That was quite cumbersome, and I’d occasionally forget to bring the books. Next, I tried purchasing several copies of the books and leaving a copy in every location where I may get an opportunity to read; so, one copy at home, one in my car, one at my desk at work. This got a little expensive.”
King, like most of the readers I communicated with, loves print books and isn’t about to give them up, yet he now estimates that at least three-quarters of the books he reads are on his phone. Others reported reading anywhere from 25 percent to all of the books they read on their phones, with the average being a little more than half. The titles they read include Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” and books by Dickens, Immanuel Kant, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as contemporary titles like Adam Begley’s new biography of John Updike. Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning “The Goldfinch,” published last year, was mentioned more than once, perhaps because, at 755 pages in hardcover, it’s a particularly cumbersome book to carry around. Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir has read “Bleak House,” “Anna Karenina” and “The Magnificent Ambersons” on his iPad Touch, mostly while riding the subway. He’s now reading George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss.”
Some of the advantages of smartphone reading are common to all e-books: The ability to store many titles in a single device, to borrow e-books from the library without worrying about returning them on time and to get the book you want in an instant. Most of my respondents also own tablets or e-readers, as well, but these devices get left at home a lot. (One man described his tablet as the “helpless prisoner of my children.”) Most people have to carry their phones everywhere as it is, so why bother with a separate, and bulkier, device? Because it’s such an essential tool, they also say they’re far less like to lose their phone than they are to misplace a print book or e-reader.
Many partisans of the book consider the image of modern Americans transfixed by their smartphones to represent the antithesis of a literate culture. But that’s all it is: an image, and as Maud Newton’s anecdote testifies, appearances can be deceiving. As a literary critic, I frequently hear the wistful confessions of people who say they “don’t have the time” to read books anymore. If the only way to read a book is to don a smoking jacket and settle into a leather armchair for the entire evening with a hardcover and a snifter of brandy, well, then few of us do. But for all the (not unfounded) fretting over the way electronic devices have chipped away at our attention spans and distracted us from deep thoughts, there has also been this quiet resurgence of interest in and enthusiasm for some of our culture’s most treasured literary works.
Smartphone reading has one downside that particularly irritates Thompson, however. He likes to take his kids to the park, find a bench and read while they play. “I’m aware that people around me are probably thinking that I’m ignoring my kids to check my corporate email or play Angry Birds or something else culturally unvaluable,” he said, keenly aware that they would not judge him so harshly if he opened a hardcover book. “So I’m thinking of getting a T-shirt that says, “Piss off: I’m reading ‘War and Peace.’”
