Three excellent books about reading

The most excellent class of Adult Services, a.k.a. Reader Advisory, has come to an end. I loved everything about this class, which taught the art and craft of librarians recommending leisure reading to adults. Besides reading some great books for my book talks -- see my book talks on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Book of Chameleons -- I also read some great books about reading. Here's a recap of three of my favorites.

Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading Libraries and Community, by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Paulette M. Rothbauer. I love the old saying, "In God we trust. All others must bring data." This book brings the data on reading research, providing empirical evidence gleaned from recent studies on why people read, how they become proficient readers, and how they select books. The key point for me is that people who are skilled readers "speed through stretches of text with apparent effortlessness." For children, "well-designed phonics instruction" is best, and being read to aloud is crucial. Adults should be encouraged to engage in sustained long-form reading in whatever genre or style they prefer, because reading begets more reading.

The Reader, the Text and the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, by Louise Rosenblatt. If only I had heard of Louise Rosenblatt when I was in college, back in the early 1990s during the heyday of literary theory. Back then, you could read any old book you wanted and then say it was either reifying cultural hegemony or subversively troubling societal norms. In retrospect, these were interesting intellectual exercises, but it also seemed silly to argue that a reader could find any meaning she wanted in a given text. Rosenblatt, on the other hand, acknowledges that readers bring their own assumptions and beliefs to a text that they read, but she also says that the author has a particular meaning she or he is trying to convey. Two human beings are involved in the transaction between author and reader, and you can't theorize away the intentions and motivations of either party. This reminds me of author Zadie Smith's metaphor, that the relationship between author and reader is akin to the relationship between a composer of music and the musician who sits down to play the work.

Great Books for High School Students: A Teacher's Guide to Books that can Change Teen's Lives, edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford. These are seven essays written by teachers who describe the particular experiences they've had teaching novels to high school students. The essays are personal and subjective, and fascinating reading. I thought the essay about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, was particularly good, showing why it's such a challenging book. The teacher wrote about how her students had strong but very different reactions to the book's depictions of slavery and race. Then there were the efforts of other adults to stop her from teaching the book. I also thought the teacher revealed that she wasn't quite as emotionally prepared as she thought she was to teach a book that raises all the sensitive issues that Huckleberry raises. It was a good essay, very personal and honest and grounded in real-world circumstances. The other books teachers wrote about include Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison; Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; Oresteia, by Aeschylus; Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya; Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.