What’s happening in the library?

To start with, I’m going to suggest a few columns from the Guardian (UK).

• Authors Choose Their Top 10 Books on different topics, e.g., island books, romps and romances, black comedies, boredom, wilderness, etc.
• Literary Companions for Summer Travel — where authors suggest books perfect for particular destinations, e.g., Julian Barnes on Sicily, William Boyd on L.A., William Dalrymple on India, Maureen Freely on Turkey, etc.
• Digested Reads — the must-read books in 400 words — for those who have no time and don’t want to be left out of literary conversations…

Whichbook.net, a completely new way of choosing books to read, lets you specify the level of what you want in a book — the degree of happy/sad, easy/demanding, sex/no sex, safe/disturbing, etc.

Another fun one is Literature-Map, also known as the tourist map of literature — plug in your favorite author and see which other authors are located close to them on the map.

In the US the National Book Critics Circle has put out a list of Spring 2008 Good Reads.

I’ve also put together a list via WorldCat (a compendium of thousands of library catalogs from around the world): Summer Reading Suggestions. It contains both books I’ve read and books I want to read. Note that WorldCat also lets you type a city/country and it will find the libraries closest to you holding that book.

Here are a few book reviews that helped me determine my own to-read list:

• Say You’re One of Them — by Uwem Akpan
  

  “Poverty, slavery, mass murder: These are the torments that devour the children in “Say You’re One of Them,” a book so overwhelming that when you put it down — if you can — it takes a minute to adjust to the world around you. The writer is Uwem Akpan, a young Nigerian Jesuit. Each of the five stories in his debut collection is set in a different African nation; each is told from a child’s point of view; two are strong, three are devastating.”

• The Knife of Never Letting Go — by Patrick Ness
  

  “It’s hard to review The Knife of Never Letting Go without spoiling the story. It’s so cunningly written that I was 100 pages in before I even realised what genre it was.” (a children’s book — but don’t let that put you off…)

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — by David Wroblewski
  

  “Wroblewski creates a tender coming-of-age story and grafts onto it a literary thriller with strong echoes of Shakespeare and “The Jungle Book.” The result is the most hauntingly impressive debut I’ve read all year.”

Children in the Infant section, just like older students, need to keep reading and hearing stories over the summer, so I recommend parents have a look at the K2 Super Story selections. For the past six months each K2 class has read and re-read a set of 50 picture books, with the goal of identifying which books are best in some way. Each class generated the rubric by which to judge the stories — and voting took place last week for the books with the “Best Words”, “Best Pictures”, “Best Characters”, etc.

Check out this year’s winners and the range of books read (about 130 books across the four classrooms).

Don’t worry if your child is going into K2 next year — the Super Story collections vary each year, so it doesn’t matter if they read any of the books ahead of time. Besides, they’re all meant to be books well worth reading again and again.

Top 3 Winners across all four K2 classes

Holidays, whether spent at home or traveling, are a perfect time for reading.

Need some suggestions?

I’ve prepared a couple of lists — Great Reads for lower primary students and upper primary students — which are available in the library as a pamphlet and as a PDF download.

The two groupings are only a general guideline; children in lower primary might find books on the upper primary list both accessible and interesting, and upper primary students might read books on the lower primary list with great pleasure. Ease and enjoyment are the main reading goals.

I teach students to use the 5-Finger Test (by which they count the number of words they don’t know on a random page to determine if a book may be too hard for them to read easily).

Some websites allow you to search for children’s books by age or grade level (where 2.3 would mean 3 months into Grade 2, and 5.1 would be the first month of Grade 5):

• Book Hive — this US site has a great “Find a Book” feature. Use their Advanced Search function to search for books by either age (K-Grade 3 or Grades 4 – 6), genre, or even number of pages!
• Mrs. Mad’s Book-a-Rama – a UK website devoted to children’s books, including news, reviews, recommendations, games, etc., as well as a Search the Bookshelf function based on age and genre
• BookWink — a US website that allows you to search for books by Subject, Grade Level, Author, or Title
• Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard — lets you search for books by grade level or interest level

However, use those age/grade levels recommendations with caution! Philip Pullman, author of the best-selling trilogy “His Dark Materials”, has recently started a campaign against publishers labeling books with recommended ages of readers. As he and other authors argue,

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.
• Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.

There was a recent column in the Times (UK) on the controversy titled “Judge a book by its cover: Publishers give us plenty of clues to a title’s target audience; we don’t need read-by dates as well“, as well as another in the Telegraph (UK).

Please consider the Rights of the Reader, as proposed by Daniel Pennac, an award-winning French author for children and adults, in his book, Comme un Roman, which discusses how to raise children as readers. (Note: there are three English translations: Better Than Life, Reads Like a Novel, and The Rights of the Reader.)

The right not to read

The right to skip pages

The right not to finish

The right to reread

The right to read anything

The right to escapism

The right to read anywhere

The right to browse

The right to read out loud

The right to not defend your tastes