Reading about Reading and More

202. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

 

Everywhere I looked on blogs, on book lists, on book review sites was this book. Almost every review was a rave. I liked it, too. A solid story, about intriguing people in a little-known part of the world, a bit predictable, with a happy ending that was unlikely but not impossible. The characters were good, but real, and never sappy.

 

203. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

 

Just as I felt certain things would turn out okay in Guernsey, I felt certain things were going to be bad on The Road. The plot is quite simple: A man and his son are traveling down a road, headed south, away from the terrible cold. Something awful has happened to the world. Everything has burned and ashes lay everywhere in drifts. Death is on every page of the story. If the man had simply been traveling down the road on his own, the story would not have had the power it has. The boy was the only hope of the story, though how the world could ever be restored I don’t know. I hated the story at times, but I also found it very true. It was beautifully written and very thoughtful.

 

204. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

 

I’d planned to browse through this book, but once I got started I couldn’t stop reading. I was reading about reading and it was fascinating. Here are some thoughts I want to save and think about:

 

“While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture.”

 

“The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering.”

 

“…by five years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle-class child. In another study, which looked at how many words children produce at age three, children from impoverished environments used less than half the number of words already spoken by their more advantaged peers….In the most underprivileged community, no children’s books were found in the homes; in the low-income to middle-income community, there were, on average, three books; and in the affluent community there were around 200 books….One of the major contributors to later reading was simply the amount of time for ‘talk around dinner.’ The importance of simply being talked to, read to, and listened to is what much of early language development is about….”

 

“Some up-front costs, such as transfer errors and substitutions from one language to the next, are less important than the advantages, if…the child learns each language well.” (learning two languages)

 

“When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years, and that at least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge importance of a child’s development of vocabulary becomes crystal-clear.”

 

“An enormously important influence on the development of comprehension in childhood is what happens after we remember, predict, and infer: we feel, we identify, and in the process we understand more fully and can’t wait to turn the page.”

 

‘Recent reports from the National Reading Panel and the “nation’s report cards” indicate that 30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fluent readers with adequate comprehension….the entire school system (has) different expectations for students from grade 4 on. This approach is encapsulated in the mantra that in the first three grades a child “learns to read,” and in the next grades a child “reads to learn.”‘

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