What Dr. Seuss Did For Reading

National Read Across America Day is celebrated on March 2nd, the birthday of Dr. Seuss. The annual event is part of Read Across America, an initiative on reading creative by the National Education Association. Since the event is designed to encourage reading in children and is fostered through the schools, when March 2nd lands on a weekend, the day is observed on the closest school day.

Theodor Geisel - 1957

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1904. He published his first book for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937. But it was in 1955 when an educational specialist asked him if he would write a book to help children learn how to read that his fame really grew.

Seuss was given a list of 300 words that most first-graders know, and he had to write the book using only those words. Seuss wasn’t sure he could do it, but as he looked over the list, two words jumped out at him: “cat” and “hat.”

Seuss spent the next nine months writing what would become The Cat in the Hat (1957). That book is 1,702 words long, but it uses only 220 different words.

The genius of his approach was that children could read books on their own because of the repetition, rhyming and limited vocabulary needed.

A few years later, Seuss’s publisher bet him $50 that he could not write a book using only 50 different words. Seuss won the bet with his book Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which uses exactly 50 different words. Only one of those words has more than one syllable: the word “anywhere.”

Dr. Seuss Official website seussville.com

          

Virtual Book Clubs

Peter is not really a book club type.

Book clubs, where people read a common book and then meet to discuss it, have been around for a very long time. There was a plethora of them in England in the 19th century and I'm sure they existed in almost every reading country. I know of a few in my area that meet at libraries. But I have also been seeing a kind of virtual book club scene developing online.

Remember Oprah's Book Club on her network TV show? It had tremendous book-selling power. her selection could send a book right to the best-seller list. Good for publishers and authors and good if it got more people to read and think about their reading. I thought her club ended with the show, but it still ives online at oprah.com, but when I looked at it it was a bit too busy with ads for Waitress on Broadway and how to self-publish your book, a popup for her magazine, and links to articles on the web about “crepey skin” and “7 foods that cause gray hair” and “9 ways that coconut oil will change your life.” Very commercial and without any book talk.

Other celebrities have taken to suggesting books for us to read. Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook and Emma Thompson Watson on Twitter and Reese Witherspoon on Instagram are all letting us know what to read via social media. Oscar-winner Brie Larson recommended Slade House by David Mitchell to her 240,000 followers at that time. Emma Watson, one from Hogwarts, now a feminist, recommended a non-fiction title, My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem to her 20.8 million followers on Twitter. I saw that Reese Witherspoon, using Instagram, recommended Opening Belle, a novel by Maureen Sherry.

Is it a "book club" if all you do is suggest something to read? No. Do we trust that celebrities are recommending books they read and really enjoyed or do we suspect that this is just marketing? I'm half and half on that.

I had seen last December that Mark Zuckerberg recommended reading The Beginning of Infinity to his 48.9 million followers, so I borrowed the book from the library. It's not a new book (published in 2011) so I don't think it was a new book promotional kind of suggestion. Subtitled "Explanations that Transform the World," it is a science book for the general public by physicist David Deutsch.

Deutsch looks at the enlightenment of the 18th century as a beginning of an infinite sequence of knowledge creation. He defines knowledge as information that is proven and allows for some real process that is physically possible to be performed. That time that we call "The Enlightenment" provided the conditions for knowledge creation. It disrupted the earlier static societies that stifled creativity and did not encourage free and open debate. It's that a similar time had not previously existed. Earlier we had the Renaissance in Florence and Plato's Academy in Golden age Athens, and things got going, but then they were met with resistance to change.

I thought the book was pretty interesting, but I'll admit that I skipped and skimmed. After all, there was no test or book club I had to answer to later.

Zuckerberg never really promoted it as a book club, although Facebook - or some new online platform of their creation - certainly would have allowed for such a thing to occur. It was his New Year's Resolution for 2015 to read one book every two weeks. he chose books which "emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies."

Actress Reese Witherspoon seems to be a real reader and she has already brought two of her favorite reads — Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild — to the big screen. (I read both. Disliked the first, really liked the second - true for the books and the movie versions.)

Am I a bit suspect that the books she picks are all part of a clever and long range film marketing strategy? Yes, but I really like Reese the actress, so I accept that this is the plan.

In the works are adaptations of Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive, Garth Callaghan‘s memoir Napkin Notes: Make Lunch Meaningful, Life Will Follow. Read now and the movie will follow.

Then there is actor James Franco with 5 million followers on Instagram. He, who has all kinds of degrees now in literature, seems to recommend books off the class syllabi. They are good reads and books I would recommend too - like Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. And both already have film versions, so I don't see any film crossover deals. Unless he gets a publisher kickback, this seems well-intentioned.

He has a book club page on GoodReads.com but it just shows some book jackets, so it is a pretty lousy club to belong to if you're looking for discussion. But, that site allows you to discuss any book on GoodReads and leave reviews and recommendations, so it is a site I use and would recommend.


Do you participate in a real-world or virtual book club? Have any recommendations about online book clubs or books? Comment below. But this isn't a book club.

Proust and the Squid: Science and the Reading Brain

"We can receive the truth from nobody: we must create it ourselves." - Marcel Proust

"Human beings were never born to read," writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new.

Wolf chronicles how the reading brain emerged. I would have assumed that it started about 5000 years ago when writing began. Wolf looks at that, but also over the course of a single child's life, and talks about the process and why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts.


This was a book recommendation a few years ago from a purely online friend, Bruce Schauble. I finally got to read the book, but here was Bruce's original review that piqued my interest.

"I've spent the last four days reading one of the best books about education that I've ever gotten my hands around. It goes by the unlikely name of Proust and the Squid, and the subtitle is "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain." Maryanne Wolf, the author is a cognitive scientist, an educator, a parent, and a formidably talented reader and writer. In this book, she manages to convey in a comprehensive and comprehensible way the status of our current understanding of reading as a process from pretty much every relevant point of view: historical, psychological, physiological, sociological, and educational..."

read Bruce's full review at http://throughlines.blogspot.com

The book has lots of examples to support her theories. One example theory: the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, because the transformations in this changed reading brain have profound implications for every child.

It is not an easy book. After all, she is a professor in the department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University and an academic. But you can handle it.

By the way, the odd title refers to the different but complementary ways of understanding the reading process - but you'll have to read it to understand why.

The Hemingway Patrol

Hemingway on Pilar

Today is the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, IL

Hemingway's longtime publisher, Scribner, reissued all his novels a few years ago and books continue to be published about him. The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats Aboard the Pilar was one I read a few summer ago. It is about that time in his life when he was itching to play a part in World War II.

Using his his own ship, the Pilar, which was designated by the military as a Q-Ship, he and his crew set out to monitor German submarine activity off Cuba and the Florida coast.I don't know exactly what anyone would have expected them to do if they actually encountered a sub with this fishing boat. There's a section of Islands in the Stream (the novel and the movie version) that deals with this period in his life.

Hemingway did get to be a war a war correspondent for Collier's magazine, and observed the D-Day invasion from offshore on a landing craft. (Apparently, his wife of that time, Martha Gellhorn, upstaged him by making it on shore on June 7 disguised as a nurse. I read more recently about his meetup with J.D. Salinger during that time.

I also reread A Moveable Feast which was re-released in a Restored Edition. It's not a novel but it is one of my favorite Hemingway books. When Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, the manuscript of this memoir wasn't finished. (No title, introduction, or final chapter.) and it wasn't published until 1964 after his fourth wife, Mary, and an editor put together the pieces.

It's about when he was young and writing in the Paris of the 1920s. When I first read it in college, I loved the talk about writing and Paris and the food and the drinking, but hated his unkind treatment of his "friend" F. Scott Fitzgerald who was another literary hero of mine.

Actually, he's also pretty rough on Gertrude Stein and Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He had it in for rich people then and he seemed still attached to his first wife Hadley.

In reading about this new edition, I discovered that the new editors are Pauline's grandson, Sean Hemingway, and his uncle, Patrick Hemingway (Pauline's son). I'm guessing that Pauline gets better treatment this time out, though I don't know if that was Ernest's intent.

On the Amazon website, they link to two pdf files of the original handwritten manuscript. I like this section that contains his idea about writing "one true sentence."

see the full pages

I know a number of people who really dislike Hemingway as a man and as a writer. Most of them are women who have issues with his macho image and his female characters. I have liked his writing, especially the short stories, since I was about 14 and wanted to be a writer.

I actually feel bad for Hemingway. I think he was really misunderstood. I think he became a victim of his own celebrity and began to play the role of Hemingway in the same way as other celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe.

He was a heavy drinker, an alcoholic in his later years, suffered from manic depression. He was actually given electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic which he blamed for his memory loss. It saddens me to think that for someone like him who loved to write, who needed to write, could not go on if he could not write.



Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, but on a memorial outside town overlooking Trail Creek is a eulogy he actually wrote for a friend (Gene Van Guilder) but that applies well to his own life.

Best of all he loved the fall

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

Leaves floating on the trout streams

And above the hills

The high blue windless skies

Now he will be a part of them forever

A Good Sign for Reading?

Should it been seen as a good sign for the state of reading that the top-selling, most wished-for and most-gifted item on the Amazon website is the Kindle?

I can see most-wished-for (as in their customer wish-lists) since it would be cool to have one, but they cost a couple hundred bucks. (Even with Black Friday deals).

The Kindle Store currently has more than 360,000 titles, including 101 of 112 books currently found on the New York Times Best Seller list. New York Times Best Sellers and most new releases are only $9.99, and there are a good number for less.

I suspect that if I had one, I would be even more behind on my To Read list.

Or should this be viewed as a positive economic indicator, rather than one about reading habits?

Will You Pay For The News?

Recently, the New York Times e-mailed a survey to its print subscribers to ask how they felt about paying for online content. For access to its website, nytimes.com, they are considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to view articles, blogs and multimedia.

Right now it is all free. That's a hard model to back away from and expect users to stpay. Will there be added value?

While all print media is having problems, some are moving to the web with some success. It can't all be free - that's no "business" model.

The Rocky Mountain News shut down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a web-only publication. The business model has been to run online advertising, but that probably can't fund full news services. Subscriptions - sort of a cable TV versus free broadcast TV model - is hardly a new idea.

I don't have the answer for them, but I don't think this recycled ideas are it.

Best Beach Books Ever

I never quite understood the "beach book" genre. I know it means more lightweight, entertaining reading. The thing is, especially in my teaching years, summer was one of the few times I had to do ANY outside reading, so I tended to read whatever was on my "to read" list. If the book happened to be non-fiction of Literature, it didn't much matter.

If you are a serious novelist, would being on the beach book list be an insult?

Last month, NPR asked folks to send in nominations for the Best Beach Books Ever and they ended up with 600 titles. Then their book reviewers, editors and producers cut it to 200 titles, which they now offer for voting.

NPR gives its own definition as books that are "enthralling enough to inoculate vacation-goers against the vagaries of missed flights and bad weather" and acknowledges that while many "great books" aren't beach book that both The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice were popular nominees.

If you choose to vote, you get to pick 10 books to create their final list of 100. They will post the final tally on July 29 and I'll post my own ten choices from their list.

Kindle time?

The Amazon Kindle is now $299, so is it time to buy one? I have yet to actually know someone who has one, so all I know is the hype. Any Kindle love stories out there?

Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy. Over 300,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, and magazines. Many of the New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99.

It is tempting...

Bookmarks

I picked up the magazine BOOKMARKS while killing some time in a Barnes & Noble cafe over coffee. The Edward Hopper illustration on the cover caught my eye. (Does B&N realize that people are using the store as a library? Is this a good thing for business?)

Bookmarks presents a few hundred book reviews each month with summaries of hundreds of opinions from every major newspaper and magazine. You get a comprehensive look at the latest fiction, nonfiction, and children's books.

They do classic books as well. The "Book by Book" author profiles focus on the major works of great writers, from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf.

Bookmarks also covers genres from the best American biographies to great mystery series, and uses experts in each issue to recommend the best books on a specific nonfiction subject: consciousness, games, ancient Greece, magic, travel, true crime...

They also publish lists of subscribers' favorites featuring lots of oddball choices that don't make the major reviews, and a profile of a book club discussing the books its members loved or hated.