Read All About It!

This past weekend, Open Books had its first Spotlight on Literacy program!  Six of us got together and watched the film Waging a Living and discussed David Shipler’s book The Working Poor.  While it was a small group, we had an excellent discussion on how difficult it can be to achieve the American Dream, and how so many people have to “hustle backwards” to make ends meet.  What’s hustling backwards, you ask?  One woman profiled in Waging a Living got a pay increase of $450/month at her job, which thrilled her (as it would anyone) as she would be better able to care for her five children.  That, however, meant that she no longer qualified for many governmental benefits.  In fact, when her paycheck increased that $450, she lost over $600 in benefits.  So actually, with her pay increase… she was losing more money.

It’s hard to know whether this situation is good or bad.  It makes sense that as people make more money, they receive less aid.  But is it fair to lose aid at a faster rate than your pay is increasing?  This was one of the many questions we confronted during our discussion.  We also discussed how over 50% of the working poor in America are single mothers, how very few had even a high school diploma and many only had very basic literacy skills.

It was not all gloom and doom, however!  We decided the best way for us to help is to look at cases individually, instead of trying to fix an entire governmental system.  That’s what we do at Open Books, helping students become better readers.  Other organizations that we recommend?  The Inspiration Corporation and the Jane Addams Resource Corporation.

We’re excited to have begun our Spotlight on Literacy series!  Are there any topics in particular you’d like us to explore through these events?

If you missed the discussion but are interested in the topic, the Open Books store currently has copies of The Working Poor available!

As a former accountant, the date April 15th always has a mystical and magical quality in my mind.  Busy season is over!  Mid-April for accountants is, as stated so eloquently in the movie The Break-Up, “party time in the biz.”

I am no longer in public accounting, but I’m thrilled to say that even in the literacy biz, April 15th is party time!  The amazing triumvirate of readergirlz, Guys Lit Wire and YALSA has joined forces with If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything to donate tons of books to two Native American schools.  The project involves librarians, authors and teens, and it can also involve YOU.  Would you like to buy a book for students at the schools?  There are detailed instructions on Guys Lit Wire, but for your convenience I will copy and paste here.  It’s a little complicated, but well worth the effort!

If that’s too complicated, though, readergirlz has another way to get involved.   “in its drive to spur reading on a national scale, readergirlz invites teens and YA authors to leave a book in a public place on April 15th. Participants can download bookplates to insert into the books they’ll leave behind.”

Open Books applauds the organizations above for working so hard to get books to students on Native American reservations.  There is nothing better than enriching lives through the COMMUNITY-DRIVEN power of books!

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Instructions for donating books directly to the schools (from Guys Lit Wire):

First, hit the Powells site and on the upper right click on “wish list”. From there you will be prompted for the email address of the list owner. Type in “guyslitwire@gmail.com”. You will then be given the choice to select either Ojo Encino or Alchesay. Once you are looking at the lists (which contain hundreds of titles) you can make your selection of a new, used, or sale copy. After your done and ready to make your purchase you will be asked to confirm that you are buying books for a certain wishlist. Checking those boxes will keep the lists up to date and prevent books from appearing as unsold even after they were purchased. Now all you have to do is enter the mailing addresses, and here they are:

Mary Nickless
Ojo Encino Day School Librarian
HCR 79 Box 7
Cuba, NM 87013
(505) 731-2333

Marilyn Hill
Alchesay High School
200 Falcon Way
Whiteriver, AZ 85941
928-338-4848

One thing I miss about being in high school English class is the engagement that went along with our reading assignments. While I love reading and treasure it for the “me” time that it gives me, I miss reading as a collaborative activity. Many books, I feel, are better appreciated when you can talk over their fine points and their controversial aspects with other readers.

The internet is bringing this ability back to readers who are no longer in school in various ways, one of which is the BookGlutton website.  BookGlutton’s aim is to “build an experience that is simultaneously a book group, a computer, and a book.”  How does it achieve this?

By making reading a group experience.  On BookGlutton, you read a book, but you can annotate it while you do so.  I personally abhor writing in books, but with these BookGlutton e-books, you can highlight a sentence or paragraph and ask for other readers’ opinions on it.  You can link to websites that explain what the word means.  You can say why that particular sentence makes you happy/sad/angry/excited about the book or character.  So even if you aren’t in an English literature class, you can still read, enjoy and engage with others about books while you read them.

Another site with a similar goal is Book Drum, where readers annotate their favorite books with graphics, links, articles and other information that makes reading a more multi-dimensional experience.  And one that can be much more interactive and social than reading has been in the past.

What do you think?  Should reading be a solitary activity or do you like the idea of engaging with a community?

J. D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, died on Tuesday at 91 years old.  He was famous, in the first half of his life, for his writing.  He was famous, in the second half of his life, for not wanting to be famous.  His stories about teenage angst and rebellion were required reading across American high schools, where so many students shuddered at the thought of ever becoming phonies in adulthood themselves.

There are a great many beautiful and detailed obituaries about Salinger, but I think The Onion catches the tone of his writing and his life perfectly.  Salinger will be missed, but Holden will live on.

Here are some selected quotes from Salinger.  His characters swear a lot, so this is a self-selective list.  What are your favorites?  Feel free to share!:

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

You know the feeling… standing in an aisle at the library, finding a book that your parents told you not to read, or that has been on every “banned book” list that you can remember, slowly sliding it off the shelf, shuffling to a darker corner and cracking open the cover so that you can see the forbidden fruit.

It’s fun to do at any age!  What’s more fun, though, than reading as an adult books that were deemed inappropriate for you as a child?

This website, the Curious Pages, is all about books that could in some ways be deemed “inappropriate” for children.  It is full of pictures and hilarious explanations of inappropriate behavior, and is very tongue-in-cheek.  It’s great fun!  So next time you stop by the Open Books store, you can check out our children’s section for one of these books and feel a little frisson of excitement when you pull one out.  Who knows what will happen when you enjoy all sorts of crazy, frowned-upon things like rabbits playing brass instruments, ducks carrying books and wonderful books for read-aloud that we can’t actually read (as they are in a different language).  Just take the books to a relatively dark corner of the store (if you can find one) and settle in for a juicy tale.  Don’t worry- if I see you there, I won’t call you out.