Five Reasons to Support Indie Bookstores

What's so great about independent bookstores? Why should you support them?

1.  Indie bookstores are run and staffed by people who know and love books.  These are people who work in a bookstore for the chance to be around books and people who read them.  They know they're not going to be making huge profits.

2. Indie bookstores support literacy.  They partner with schools, organize book clubs, and showcase local authors.

3. Indie bookstores are cozy and welcoming.  They're a human size, usually 2000-3000 square feet instead of 20,000 square feet like a big box store.

4. They're local.  When you support an indie bookstore, you're supporting the vitality of the neighborhood surrounding it. If you want a place to browse, talk about books, and support brave and hardworking entrepreneurs in your neighborhood, make regular visits to your local independent bookstore.

5. They're opinionated.  Independent bookstores have their own publication, Indie Next, a quarterly newspaper that contains recommendations from independent bookstore owners and staff.  Instead of just reading about bestsellers or books with the biggest advertising budgets, you can read recommendations from astute and sympathetic readers.

6.  Here's a bonus reason for the month of October:  you can win a stocking stuffer.  Visit your local independent bookstore, buy a book, scan the receipt, and send it to me at penny@tumblehomelearning.com.  In return, I will send you a Tangram set.  If your scanned receipt show that you bought a copy of Lost in Lexicon or The Ice Castle, I'll send two Tangram sets.*

If you need help locating your closest independent bookstore, check here.

Go on.  If it's been too long since you stepped into that local store with its smell of books and its crowded shelves, make this the week you visit. You'll enjoy it, and before long you'll even have a new puzzle to use or share for the holidays.


* Offer good while Tangram supplies last.  (We have about 900 left.)

The dark side of teen literature

Last week's Wall Street Journal presents a debate about the current state of young adult literature, which means books directed at ages 12-18. In an opinion piece called "Darkness Too Visible," Meghan Cox Gurdon laments today's fashion for dark, lurid, violent tales for teen readers. Gurdon worries that too much of current literature, driven by fashion and a desire for profit, may actually invite kids to wallow in degradation and misery. Novels about self-mutilation may encourage self-mutilation; novels about sexual abuse or incest may re-traumatize those who have experienced it.

National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, answers in a piece of his own called "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." (Grumpy aside: I guess the Wall Street Journal believes in controversy but not in apostrophes.) Alexie's argument can be paraphrased as follows: "Come on, adult world, you're kidding yourselves. Bad things are happening to kids all the time. If you think you're protecting them from the harsh realities of life, you're way too late. They need someone who is willing to talk about their experience, someone to accompany them and give them a sense of hope."

I haven't read enough of the cited books to judge the justice of Gurdon's arguments. I can say that I seem to be one of very few people in the world who was turned off by what I felt was gratuitous violence in Suzanne Collins's otherwise masterful Hunger Games. I didn't like the part where the two protagonists rest safely atop a rock while listening to their rival being slowly eaten by mutant wild dogs all night long. (As an aside, one editor at a writing conference stated his belief is that the reason dystopias are so popular with young readers is that their chaos and cruelty is a direct reflection of readers' experience in the typical American high school.)

On the other hand, I loved Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which deal with a 14-year-old girl's reaction to date rape. The daughters in our mother-daughter book club were probably twelve when we read it, and it gave us mothers an opportunity to make an impassioned plea for them to come to us if they ever met such trouble.

Still, the books I'm talking about are all award winners, and it's quite possible that other books out there are much more exploitative and much less helpful to readers. I'll have to keep reading before I can make any blanket judgment. And while I applaud young adult writers who have the courage to write about life the way it is, I hope the tide of dark vision won't submerge everything. There are more subtle and even more innocent tales worth telling as well.

Cute Eats Cute, a book review

Cute Eats Cute by C.B. Murphy is a cynical, funny, and surprisingly tender-hearted social satire and coming-of-age story. In a Minneapolis suburb, community discord over whether hunters should cull a burgeoning deer herd in the local nature reserve becomes a vehicle for dissecting a multitude of modern America's social divisions. Talk radio, New Age religion, eco-sentimentalism, pop psychology and macho hunter culture all come under Murphy's microscope.

Fifteen-year-old Sam's hippie parents want him to call them Jeff and Elissa, but they agree on little else. Elissa is an eco-feminist, a vegan, and a newly converted Wiccan, while Jeff, an officer with the Department of Natural Resources, swerves ever closer to a manly hunting culture. Sam and his band of high school friends are convinced that killing deer is cruel and harmful to the earth, and they decide to Do Something. The Something escalates from street theater to sabotage. When Megan, the object of Sam's lust, asks him to infiltrate the hunters' camp, Sam finds himself bouncing wildly among people with different belief systems and affiliations.

Sam's undercover mission allows Murphy to poke fun at a medley of characters, from the activist lesbian who wears a gas mask for her Environmental Sensitivity to the bow-toting Christian Hunters of Men. A family eco-therapist urges Sam to pass through an initiation and be on the lookout for a spiritual guide, but Sam can't figure out whether to follow a radical ecoterrorist who may or may not be advocating human sacrifice. Meanwhile his parents are on the verge of divorce, his friend Ryan always says the least helpful thing, the alluring Megan thinks he's gay, and Holly, the fourth member of their gang, gets pregnant. How does a girl who would do anything to stop the murder of deer reason about abortion?

In Murphy's pitch-perfect and very funny dialogue, characters talk past each other as if they're speaking code and never seem to arrive at truly common understanding. Sam's observations of the people and places around him are astute, but his own teenage cluelessness and confusion come through with increasing clarity. From its hilarious beginnings, the book moves almost imperceptibly to a more serious level where Sam has to make real choices with real and at times disastrous consequences. A strong action climax brings the book to a close, and if Sam's emotional confusion never entirely clears, maybe that's just a realistic reflection of what it means to live in a greyish, imperfect world. This book was great fun to read, and I recommend it highly to teen boys and adults.

March, a book review

My family has been immersed in the Civil War lately. Damian is about to go on a school trip to Gettysburg, so he's been reading The Killer Angels, and we've all been watching the Ken Burns PBS series on the war. Then a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer prize-winning novel March, which recounts the war experiences of Mr. March, the fictional father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

It's a wonderful novel, suffused with the innocent, stuffy, self-righteous and self-doubting conscience of Mr. March. March writes poetic, judicious letters home to shield his family from the confusion and horror the war brings him. At the same time his narration moves between the present and past, as he recalls not only his first shaming realization of slavery's true nature but also courtship, wealth, and the slide into idealistic poverty. While March believes that the war serves a noble cause, he finds very little nobility in the mud and ordure, lust and vengeance that surround him. Sometimes he seems a man too caught up in idealism to see the people nearest him as they reaaly are.

Then there's Marmee, the saintly mother of Little Women. (Brooks quotes her mother telling her, when at the age of ten Brooks read Alcott's classic for the first time, "Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.") Brooks's Marmee is a passionate woman with a temper worse than Jo's. She loves her husband, but the two of them, trying to live up to each other's ideals, often misunderstand each other. Forever the dutiful wife, Marmee is nevertheless furious with her husband for going to war, for becoming ill, and for hiding the truth of his inner life.

Perhaps most compelling of all is the character of Grace. Beautiful and cultured, Grace is a slave, companion to the plantation mistress when March first meets her. During the war she becomes a nurse in the Washington hospital where March lies delirious from "bilious fever and pneumonia" after war and vengeful Confederates have laid waste his dreams. Grace has the dignity and courage of someone who has always faced reality in a way March has been unable to do.

In a way, this book reads as the coming-of-age story of a forty-year-old man. March is a book about war, ideals, marriage, and our failure to communicate with those we most love. Closely observed, psychologically astute, and written with simple elegance, this is a very fine book. I recommend it.

Gender and reading scores

Worldwide, boys lag behind girls in reading. The 2009 PISA reading exams for 15-year-olds show boys' performance trailing girls' in all 65 participating countries. The average score difference was 39 points, reported as equivalent to about one year of schooling.

How does the US do in this regard? Interestingly, though US students scored in general at the top of the middle rank (about 17th of 65 overall), we had one of the lower girl-boy differences, ranking 5th with a score difference of 25 points.

The 2010 report on PISA offers some intriguing hints about the differences in how boys and girls read. For example, almost 30% of test items consisted of non-continuous text such as maps, tables, graphs, and diagrams. On these items, girls still scored better than boys, but the score difference fell by about six points. That is, boys scored relatively better on text that asked them to examine a diagram or table and extract information than they did on reading and interpreting chunks of continuous literary or informational text. Maybe boys rely more on visual or spatial clues, or maybe they have shorter attention spans.

To dig a little deeper into trends in boy-girl reading gaps, I looked at NAEP scores for 1998, 2000, and 2009. Anyone can do the same with NAEP's very useful Data Explorer tool. NAEP, commonly called "the Nation's Report Card," tests samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in reading, mathematics, science, and sometimes other subjects. Looking at reading results over the past ten years, three trends are evident.

1. Girls score higher than boys on reading at every grade level tested, and the score differences increase as students move up in grades. For example, here's how much better girls scored than boys at the different grades in 2009.

4th grade 6 points
8th grade 10 points
12th grade 12 points

What do these differences mean? Although converting score differences to instructional time is somewhat shaky statistically, NAEP is a continuous scale with an average score difference between grades 4 and 8 of 43 points and between grade 8 and 12 of 24 points. Therefore, we could estimate that the 4th grade gap is equivalent to about 5 months of school time and the 8th and 12th grade gaps are equivalent to between 13 months and 2 years.

2. Girl-boy reading score differences have narrowed over the past decade. The boy-girl gap has fallen by 20% to 45% since 1998.

3. The reason for the gap decrease, though, is mixed. At 4th grade, everybody's scores have gone up, while boys have gained more - cause for celebrations. At 8th grade, boys improved while girls' performance remained essentially flat. And at grade 12, girls' scores fell while boys' scores hardly budged. This is part of an overall trend in reading: we're making progress in the younger grades, but that progress hasn't translated into more proficient reading at the higher grades.

There's a lot to think about in delving into these data, and I hope to keep delving in future posts, so tune in again tomorrow. I promise fewer statistics and more ideas about what might help.

Why Physical Books Are Better than E-Books

Books with pages are better than books with kilobases. Sure, e-books might be convenient (that is, light) to take on long trips, as long as you're not camping somewhere where you can't recharge the battery, but they're just not as satisfying. Here's why:

(1) Real books smell better.

(2) You can whiffle the pages of real books. This is a habit I've had since childhood. You know how kids take a pad of paper and draw a cartoon figure in the corner of every page, gradually changing the figure's position so it makes a little animated movie when they set the pages fluttering with their thumbs? I do that, but without the little pictures. I just find it calming.

(3) With a real book, you know how far back to turn when you're looking back through the book for some reminder. My thanks to Charles Gale who pointed me to this article in Technology Review addressing this important point. The article stresses that our mental capacity for spatial relations helps us know where to find things. We're better at estimating where some fact can be found in a book physically--about how thick was the part of the book that came before it?--than we are at saying, "Oh, I think that was 37% of the book ago."

(4) Real books are more satisfying to lend. Sure, the Kindle now has this fancy-schmancy system for lending content from one Kindle to another for up to a month. But that's like file-sharing. It's weightless. It can't compare to placing a weighty object in another person's hands along with all the weight of your implicit trust that the recipient is going to return the offering in good time and good condition.

(5) Real books have better pictures. You may say that's changing, but then I"ll say that real books have much better covers.

(6) Real books are better for reading to a child on a couch. The best position for reading to a child is with one hand holding one side of the book and the other arm encircling the child until that arm's hand reaches the other side of the book. E-books are too skinny. There isn't room enough for that second arm to go all the way around the child.

I rest my case.

Vocabulary, Reading, and the Matthew Effect

Reading and vocabulary growth are closely intertwined. The better a child's vocabulary, the better she understands what she reads. The more a child reads, the faster his vocabulary grows. Together, these observations have led to another, known as the "Matthew effect." Coined by a reading researcher, Keith Stanovich, the term "Matthew effect" refers to a point in the Gospel of Matthew which says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In reading, strong readers become ever stronger, while poor readers fall further and further behind.

How does the Matthew effect come about? Struggling readers, those who are having difficulty sounding out or figuring out words, are exposed to less text every day in school. They read simpler books, and they read slowly, laboriously working their way through the sentences. Moreover, they are far less likely than fluent readers to read outside of school. Why would they choose to do something that is so hard and frustrating?

By fourth grade, according to Anderson and Nagy, the difference in reading volume is huge. The average fourth grader (the child at the 50th percentile) spends 14 minutes a day outside of school reading any kind of text. That adds up to reading about 600,000 words a year. The child at the 90th percentile reads 54 minutes a day, or 2.36 million words a year, almost four times as many. Meanwhile, the child at the tenth percentile reads on average only about a minute a day, for a mere 51,000 words a year. Between the 10th and 90th percentile, that's a huge, 50-fold difference in exposure to written words.

The difference matters, because kids who read more gain more knowledge of vocabulary and more background knowledge. The more they read, the more they understand. It's easier for them to learn new material because they have a context which that new material can fit into. They understand pyramids in math because they've read about pyramids in ancient Egypt; they can learn about American history because they aren't scared off by such words as assembly, representation, and compact.

In their research on vocabulary development, Anderson and Nagy look back to early child development in the home. By now it's common wisdom that well-off parents talk to their children more than do parents in poverty or on welfare. In an average hour, working class parents say twice as many words to their children as do welfare parents; professional parents say almost twice as many again. Moreover, the balance of communication among welfare parents is much more tipped toward telling kids what they may not do: 11 prohibitions and 5 affirmations per hour in welfare families, versus 32 affirmations and only 5 prohibitions per hour in professional class families.

The result of this difference in conversational exposure means that children of professionals come to kindergarten knowing on average more than 3 times as many words as children from welfare families.

What does this mean for parents? It means it's important to talk to your young children and to include them in family conversation as much as possible. It also means that older children can still benefit from being read to. If you have a child who dislikes reading and resists picking up a book, it's important, at the same time as you're working to address the reading difficulty, to keep exposing the child to rich vocabulary and rich ideas through reading aloud. Surprising as it may seem, research shows that even a pre-school picture book is richer in unusual words, those that will stretch a child's vocabulary, than is prime time television or the conversation of college graduates with their family and friends.

Experience Corps

Now that the school year is underway, and some of us may be contemplating good ways to give back in the coming year, I'd like to make a plug for Experience Corps. Experience Corps provides an opportunity for volunteers age 55 and up to work with young students in schools to help them learn to read. Two thousand Experience Corps members are already working as tutors, mentors, and teacher helpers, reaching 20,000 students in 22 cities.

Members commit 4 to 15 hours a week for at least a year. They receive initial training in helping kids with literacy, and many opportunities for ongoing professional development and leadership training follow.

The program works. Studies have shown that students who work with Experience Corps members gain confidence and improve their test scores. Moreover, the adults who involve themselves report increased social and even physical well-being. They even show cognitive gains as compared to non-participating controls. What a great way to join a community of people giving back to their community, as part of an organization that is well-run and supportive!

Boys and reading

Why do boys read less well than girls and what should we do about it? In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, publisher Thomas Spence argues that the problem is the amount of time boys spend on video games, and that our response to the problem is completely wrong-headed. His title pretty much says it all: "How to Raise Boys Who Read. Hint: Not with gross-out books and video-game bribes."

Spence objects strongly to the reasoning embraced by many publishers, writers, teachers, and parents--reasoning which says that boys don't enjoy classic books, and that to entice them into reading we need to "meet them where they are" by providing gross, vulgar entertainment at their level. Their level seems to mean Captain Underpants, books about farting and butts, and a series of books on "grossology."

Spence argues that education is meant to civilize. These books prepare boys to be boorish idiots rather than good husbands and fathers. Besides, the effort to bribe the boys with vulgar books is useless. No book, not even one about farting, will be as stimulating as a video game. So turn off the games and bring out the good books, ones worth reading, ones that will help our young savages grow into civilized men.

It's a well-written piece and definitely worth reading. We parents need lots of moral support as we try to hold our stance against the raging current of ever more electronic content flooding our kids. But I object to two parts of Spence's argument.

First is a matter of fact. Spence states, "The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two." This didn't sound right to me, so I checked. It isn't right. The boy-girl achievement gap in reading, according to the longitudinal NAEP exam given nationally every few years, has existed at least since 1971. Since that time, boys' reading scores have increased substantially for 9-year-olds and to a lesser extent for 13-year-olds, while for 17-year-olds they've remained about the same. The boy-girl gap, the amount by which girls read better than boys, follows the same pattern. Among 9-year-olds it's fallen by almost half, for 13-year-olds it's fallen some, and for 17-year-olds it hasn't changed. So it's not accurate to say appearance of the gap coincides with the proliferation of video games. The gap precedes the rise of video gaming, and if anything it seems to be getting a bit better the past few years. Spence concedes as much in his response to my comment on the article.

My second objection is that Spence writes as if it's an either-or proposition: read junk or read literature. An awful lot of kids read the whole range, or progress from one to the other. Is it really so bad to read a book called Grossology which explains the science of blood, slugs, and excrement? Boys are curious about such things. Is it pandering? Yes, on one level. On another level it's telling boys that it's all right to be curious about everything, including bodily functions and things their mother doesn't want to discuss.

But I may be overstating Spence's argument. (He may have overstated it himself.) His main point I agree with. Rather than try to make books as superficially exciting as video games, let's agree that parents have the right and responsibility to limit screen time and introduce their sons to the joys of reading good, meaningful books. . . with just a little junk thrown in.

Free books on Goodreads

Winning free books sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? I just learned that Goodreads has a feature that allows authors or publishers to offer a limited number of free books to readers. The book is listed for a certain period. You enter your name and address, and at the end of the listing period, Goodreads selects the winners, and the publisher sends you a copy of the book. In return, if you're a dutiful person, you post a review of the book once you've read it.

Goodreads is an interesting site in itself. Once you register, you can list books you've read, along with your rating and, if you like, a short review. You can connect with friends to see what they've enjoyed reading lately. You build a sense of your own library and reading history, and you learn what others say about books.

So I recommend you all drop by and take a look. To get the the free books, click on "Find Books" on the homepage, and then on "giveaways" on the page that comes up.

While you're on Goodreads, look for Lost in Lexicon, and if you've read it, rate it and say something nice!

Raising Children Who Love Reading

One of the greatest gifts we can convey to our children is the love of reading. When my children were very young, I used to promise them, “Once you learn how to read, you can learn anything.
Once you learn how to read, you’ll never have to be bored again.”

Along the way, through reading and experience, I picked up a few more ideas about raising children to love reading.

1. First, of course, is to read aloud to them. Read books over and over. Talk about the pictures and what’s going to happen next. Let them “read” the parts they’ve memorized aloud to you.

2. Silly sound games prepare your children for reading by helping them with phonemic awareness, the ability to distinguish different sounds in words. For example, while cleaning the fish bowl, you can think of rhymes for fish, even nonsense ones: bish, dish, lish, wish, kish. Or you can spend a morning talking in Pig Latin (“Ere’s-hay ome-say uice-jay!”) or replace the start of each word with a W sound. Clapping out syllables as you say them can also help.

3. Letting children read in bed is a great way to make reading a privilege. What child wants to go straight to sleep on a summer evening? Reluctantly agree to let them read. “Oh, all right, but just one more chapter. Then I want you to turn out your light.” Long before my youngest son could read, he wanted to look at picture books in his crib before settling down to sleep. Sometimes there were so many books in the crib I wondered how he found room to sleep, but he grew up an early and avid reader.

4. If reading is a great effort for your child, short reading experiences may be a good place to start. Notes in a child’s lunch, written riddles, and treasure hunts are all ways to motivate reading.

5. If your reader likes stories but is unwilling to read independently, shared reading can work. Take turns reading each other pages from an easy reader. Another trick, with a slightly older child, is to read a book aloud to the middle of an exciting part, and then get called away for some other chore. The book is there, the child is aching to know what happens next . . . she may just pick the book up and keep reading.

6. Choose books together at the library. Try to help your child get a good sense of his own taste in books. Tempt him to stretch a little with books you think he’d enjoy, but let him check out plenty of silly books, easy books, or books he’s read before. I don’t know how many times my son read Shag, the Last of the Plains Buffalo. His sisters teased him, but he grew up a reader.

There are plenty of other tricks for raising kids who love reading. I’d love to hear other ideas, and I may add some more of my own soon.