For school kids: Pick your own books?

English teachers are starting to let their students pick their own books, according to a Sunday front page story in The New York Times. The story profiles a teacher who is using that method with her seventh and eighth graders. It's a fascinating piece of reporting, you should read it.
I have mixed feelings about it, though. I think the research pretty clearly suggests that readers get better by spending a lot more time reading (duh), and that struggling readers who pick their own materials are significantly more motivated. Still, I think there's so much to be gained from students sharing a common literary experience. (Right, my Romantic Poetry classmates?)
The story did note that some teachers mix methods, allowing students to pick their own books at times while also assigning everyone the same book at least once during the year. I like that.

Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace and suicide

John Wilson reflects on author Michael Chabon's recent essay about suicide and the death of David Foster Wallace. I can't find Chabon's original piece, but Wilson writes that it's part of a new nonfiction book by Chabon to be released in October, titled Manhood for Amateurs.

Interesting point:

Mr. Chabon quotes Mr. Wallace himself saying that fiction gives the reader, who is "marooned in her own skull, . . . imaginative access to other selves." But there's a problem: "that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely . . . , is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion."

Put another way, the desire for connection, for imaginative access to other selves, Mr. Chabon believes, is fundamentally a desire for escape. It drives writers and readers alike, he says, "to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it." And when "that window can't be found, or will no longer serve" -- here he returns to the question of suicide -- "small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress."

Read the whole thing via The Wall Street Journal, it's fascinating. Wilson is editor of Books & Culture: A Christian Review.

The Song is You

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality fiction written about the way we live now. Writing about right now, I imagine, is pretty tough: How can you know what will be tomorrow's important event versus a short-lived trend? A lot of successful fiction is set in the recent past, probably because it's easier for authors to get critical distance.
So I had high hopes for the recent novel The Song is You by Arthur Phillips. Julian, a music-loving an advertising photographer in New York City, is bereft after the collapse of his marriage and the loss of his family life. He's aimless until one night he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and hears a new band with an entrancing lead singer/songwriter. He writes her a series of notes on the back of bar coasters, and she finds his advice penetrating and perceptive for her climb up the rungs to pop-rock stardom. Other communications ensue, and so begins a funny, distant relationship between a fan and his muse.
I liked this novel a good bit, especially the parts where Julian remembers his father's love for the jazz singer Billie Holiday. (A charming setpiece on Billie Holiday opens the novel.) But I wanted to read a lot more about Julian and his relationship with his ex-wife, while the novel was pretty focused on his relationship with the singer. (Is this a guy thing?) Still, The Song is You is an interesting, readable novel of our current moment.
From a librarian perspective, I'd recommend The Song is You as a read-alike for Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which I think is still the definitive contemporary novel on pop music. (Read-alike is librarian jargon for, "If you liked X, you might also like Y.")

Ways of organizing books

I realized recently that I haven't been very good about writing in a tiny brown leather notebook where I keep a list of all the books I've read. In fact, my last entry in the little notebook appears to be September 2007. Gulp! I've read lots of books since then. Now I'm going back and reconstructing my reading history so I can make accurate entries in the little notebook.
Thankfully, I have several other ways of organizing my reading habits to which I can refer.
There's this blog, for one! I don't notate everything I read here, but I do quite a bit, and certainly the high points and most of the fiction. One of the things I enjoy about this blog, after keeping in touch with my old friends, is perusing the books I've read over the years through the archived entries.
Next is my catalog on LibraryThing. I started with LibraryThing back in 2005, and though other online reading sites have entered the fray since then, I still like LibraryThing the best, mostly because of its robust cataloging function. GoodReads is more oriented toward sharing books, but I found its interface a little too cumbersome to be worth switching. This is the benefit to LibraryThing's first entry: For me to switch from LibraryThing, a new service would have to offer a substantially better service. A merely somewhat better service would not be able to overcome my inertia toward changing services.
I also have kind of mixed feelings about these online services for sharing books and thoughts on books. I don't really need new ideas for books to read. I have long, long, long lists of books I want to read but probably won't ever get to, so I don't need to actively search for new ones. And I go back and forth on making my LibraryThing catalog public. Right now, it's private. I can never decide on whether I want the outside world to view my library or not. Sometimes I think it's harmless. Other times I feel like a personal library is a highly, well, personal thing, and I'm not so anxious to share. This is one area where LibraryThing could improve: Making a catalog visible to friends but not the general public. Maybe you can even do that already, but I have not yet discovered how.
Finally, I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've read with my book group. It includes the book title, author, and which member of our group picked it. Yes, I am this organized! (Read: Obsessive-compulsive)
So with these tools I am now updating the little notebook, aka the analog database.