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.

Best Books of 2006

In the spirit of High Fidelity, here's my Top 5 all-time best books of 2006 (in order):
1. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers
Eggers stuns again with an astounding tale of children surviving the civil war in Sudan. Valentino is as compelling a child narrator as any from Charles Dickens.
2. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright makes the world of Islamic fundamentalists frighteningly understandable for American readers, with additional insights on the U.S. intelligence community. A must-read for anyone who cares about the global war on terror.
3. What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills
A refreshing and much-needed intellectual approach to the New Testament Gospels. Wills refutes literalists and argues for a Christianity that is a compassionate religion of the heart.
4. Severance: Stories by Robert Olen Butler
Beautiful prose-poems on the unlikely theme of decapitation. Moving, gruesome and thoughtful.
5. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
Haddon takes the life of a semi-dysfunctional British family and infuses itwith drama and redemption. This was the very different second novel from the author of best-seller Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I can't wait to read what he writes next.

Honorable Mentions:
Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
A poor black kid from inner city Memphis attends a wealthy evangelical Christian high school. He gets adopted by a white family and becomes the most sought after football prospect in the state. With meaningful thoughts on the business of sports, the evolution of the NFL and the nature of familial love. (Whew!)
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields
Shields unpacks the life of the reclusive (and still living) Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird. Paints a great you-are-there picture of the New York literary scene for southern writers in the 1960s.

Three great books I read in 2006 that were not written in 2006:
Kafka on the Shore (2005) by Haruki Murakami
Simultaneously trippy and realistic, this is a grand adventure story where a boy named Kafka saves the world from evil incarnate that takes the form of the guy Johnnie Walker liquor bottle.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) by Philip Gourevitch
Gourevitch explains the unexplainable: the 1994 genocide in Africa.
Harbor (2004) by Lorraine Adams
A former Washington Post reporter writes a first novel about Algerian immigrants in the U.S. today.

Best of Lists

I love the "best of" lists that come out at the end of the year. And this year's seem like a diverse bunch. Here are links with notations of what I've read and would like to read. Suffice to say, all these books seem pretty darn good. Here's my round-up and comments on some of the lists. Or you can save yourself precious minutes and go straight to Metacritic's ultimate best books of 2006 page.

The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2006.
I've read The Looming Tower; I'd like to read The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, about travels through Afghanistan.

The Washington Post Top Ten Best of the Year.
Again The Looming Tower; would like to read Fiasco, an accounting of the Iraq War by Washington Post writer Thomas Ricks.

The Atlantic Monthly Books of the Year. (Subscription required, I believe.)
I haven't read *any* of these. (Shame!) I would like to read Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg and All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones.

The Los Angeles Times has two fairly long lists: Favorite Fiction and Poetry of 2006 and Favorite Nonfiction of 2006.
I'm overwhelmed by the number of pics here. The nonfiction list is more interesting. I'd like to read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn and The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.

The Seattle Times admits its Best Books of 2006 list is longish.
At least they break it up into multiple categories. I'd like to read The Echo Maker. It includes sandhill cranes, and I adore sandhill cranes. This book made a lot of the other lists too.

My subjective perusal of the above lists tells me that a lot of people love Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.
But Metacritic's more scientific approach says the best reviewed books of 2006 are Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky for fiction and (ta da!) The Looming Tower for nonfiction. Everyone loves The Looming Tower, and so do I.

Ooof, I feel tired now! So many books to consider reading ...