Near Boston. In A House Filled With Books

Nirvana for me normally. But I miss holding my sign.

I’m watching a friend’s house and his ailing dog while he’s in California for a daughter’s wedding. The house, if you’re a book person, is what you dream about. Books in every room. Three floors. Lumpy New England old-red-brick sidewalk out front. House right up to it. He’s a former magazine editor, so there are still subscriptions to Seattle magazine and the like. Framed things everywhere. Walls filled with them. Others propped around on all the floors. It’s like the Strand Bookstore.

There’s not really a TV. There are a few flat screens that another friend of his bought for him, wrongly thinking he’d see the light and get cable and use them. I tried the one in my bedroom the other night. All that came in were two New Hampshire PBS channels with shows about quilting and regional cooking. It’s nice to have no TV to default to. You listen to the Red Sox on the Bose radio in the big kitchen at an old butcher block table. You go five minutes up the street for pints to watch the Celtics. I’m not a TV guy anyway. (TV really is what’s making us sedentary and fat. It’s not Facebook or texting. We spend way more time watching TV than we do anything else. Way more. Like 50 hours a week. The culture is blindly in denial about this.)

I have resisted nosing through all his bookshelves and stacks this trip. I’m obsessed with the book I brought with me. It’s a paperback copy of  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. It was written in 1978. It won the National Book Award for non-fiction that year. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. What made me finally buy it, who knows. One of life’s wonderful mysteries, why we choose, or get chosen, and when. Maybe because a childhood friend from my rural hometown recently asked if I’d like to go hiking with him. Or maybe because I have three granddaughters who live right near the Tetons in Wyoming. Or maybe because I have found myself for years dipping into books about Buddhism. Maybe that’s why this book, now. It’s about all that stuff. And it’s filled with such a trove of details, as piled with observations and free thoughts as this wonderful house is piled with words and thoughts and imagery. It’s currently the best book I’ve ever read. I found myself thinking that I could rid my own shelves of all the books I have and just read and re-read this one. If that sounds crazy, well, then it is. ’If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog’ (the opening line of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, maybe the one book I would leave on my shelves, if I had to leave one).

The Snow Leopard is something I need. Like I need this house without a TV.

Like I need my sign.

My sign is quiet. It’s quieter than I am. When someone stops and talks to me about my sign, I want to say I’m the wrong guy to talk to. I’m filled with all the political noise that’s swirling out there. There’s too much noise about kids and schools right now. It’s almost all political. No one wants a solution because no one wants to stop fighting about it. That’s why I don’t want to talk about it on the sidewalk. I don’t want to argue. They do. I want to hold the sign that wrote itself; it even chose the period, and not a question mark. I just want to hold it. It isn’t an argument. It isn’t an ‘Occupy’ sign. Some guy from the Dept. of Ed. asked me the other day if I was with the Occupy group. He’s seen me hundreds of times. I wonder why he asked me that day. I’ve been holding the sign since September. Just holding it. No attitude. I’m just a sign-holder. I’m as much a loner as I look like standing there. I’m not going to join any group. No group has taught the kids to read. They’ve all had their chances. The sign isn’t partisan that way. It blames us all. It blames New York especially, New York with all its self-proclaimed progressive traditions. The sign just wants every school kid to learn to read well.

On one of the early pages in The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes that, ‘Ecstasy is identity with all existence.’ That’s how I feel when the sign is in front of me. That’s how I feel when someone looks/smiles/comments on the sign’s message as they walk by it. Sometimes when I can see that no one is approaching me, and won’t be, from either direction, for maybe 30 seconds, I’ll look at the sign myself. I’ll read it. I didn’t write it anymore than you did. I’m moved by it. I think it’ll change the world. I think things like maybe the kid who was killed in Tampa wouldn’t have been killed if every school kid would have been taught to read well. Young black males wouldn’t be seen as they’re seen. ‘Young black males’ wouldn’t be a category like it is now. See what I mean? That’s what I think when I read the sign. That might seem crazy to you, but it’s not.

So I sit here by a river and an ocean near Boston where folks have Red Sox decals and bumper stickers everywhere, and tattoos no doubt on places you’ll never see. I like Boston stuff. A Catholic kid in rural western New York State, I liked the Celtics before I liked the Yankees or Notre Dame. I like getting the Globe with my Times when I’m up here. I like their sports talk on the radio. Rondo is my favorite player. But I wish I were going to be back holding my sign tomorrow. Instead I have to hang here till mid-week.

I’ll read more of my book. I read it slowly.

The Best Part of Waking Up

The morning paper has textures no computer can give you

I go to the corner between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning to get the Times. My parents were early birds, now I am. I could get it delivered to my door and it’d be there that early, but I like to go out for it. I like the atmosphere of the city not quite ready for you.

A few mornings, the paper’s not there when I go. Trucks were delayed I guess. I get my coffee and go home. Those mornings I’ll read it online. (I’m not a Times subscriber so I only get a few days I can do that.) It doesn’t do it for me. It’s a hurry-up experience. The format and the videos and photo galleries and the archives, it makes you read differently. I don’t want to read differently.

I love a newspaper. I’m writing this near Boston where I am at a friend’s for a week. His house is a block and a half from a place you can get Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the Times and the Boston Globe. You can’t improve on that, and they haven’t.

One of Life’s Big Treats    

Shopping at your local bookstore

It’s an easy and quiet trip to order a book from Amazon late at night. You’re reading Moby Dick and it’s so good you want more Melville in your life, because that’s the way we are. You go right to Amazon and you order Billy Budd. No notes on index cards needed to remind you to get it at your local bookstore. Back to reading Moby Dick, more Melville on the way.

That’s efficient fun. No doubt. But deeper fun can be had by going to your favorite bookshop. Get your Melville there.

I don’t know what to say about e-books. They look so thin and colorless to me when I see someone reading one on the subway that I have nothing to say about them, except they look not at all interesting, while real books look so interesting, I’ll buy ones I may never even read.

Go to your local bookstore. They’ve got smart people in them and good-looking books you’ll want to buy.

          Give kids a magazine like this. Get them a subscription.

After all the books and articles I've read about city schools and failure and what are we going to do about them...

THIS SEEMS LIKE THE ANSWER

This essay ran in the second issue of a cityReader. It still seems like the answer:

Books you need jump off shelves to you. That’s how I wound up with four books by Mary Leonhardt. Why I needed them I didn’t know at the time the first one jumped. My kids were beyond the age where they needed my help in reading, if they ever did. They were in college or had already graduated. I was no longer a teacher. But something had me hanging around the education books in a store somewhere, and there was Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don’t. It had a boring, all-type cover and I hadn’t heard of it or Mary. But I bought it, magically, like those things happen … devoured it, like those books make you … and it became a fast friend to me, a companion like Walt Whitman’s books had once become a friend to me. In her writing I found the truth. That’s what we all look for when we cross a bookstore threshold.

When I was planning this blog, this newsletter, I took a bus to Massachusetts to meet her. She lives in Concord, retired from teaching. The first thing she said to me after hello was that she had to read to me the opening sentences of a paperback book she was reading. She was just who I hoped she would be.

A week ago she e-mailed me answers to questions I had sent her.

It appears that all cities have trouble teaching so many of their kids to read well, even though the 12 years they have them seem way more than enough time. Do you have any insight into why it's such a difficult thing to do? Or is it not so difficult and is there just something the public schools are missing?

This is what most educators don’t understand:

In reading, as in life, practice is everything. Excellent readers are kids who, somewhere along the line, fell in love with books and so spend a great deal of time reading. Schools don’t make falling in love with books a priority. Or even a goal!

Schools think kids become excellent readers by answering comprehension questions and memorizing vocabulary. Not only are they wrong about this (just ask an excellent, avid reader if he spends a lot of time filling out worksheets or memorizing vocabulary), but this belief necessitates that everyone read the same book—so the teachers can make up questions on it.

The result is that kids hate reading because they are forced to read stories and books they don’t like and then answer questions they think are stupid.

Poor kids usually don't have books at home, maybe weren't read to enough. Can school make up for that? Again, 12 years seems plenty of time to do that. Why doesn't it get done?

Sure. All educators have to do is flood every school with interesting reading material (books, comics, magazines, newspapers) and then let the kids spend at least an hour or two a day just reading. No worksheets. No memorizing vocabulary. No required reading—just free choice. And everyone needs to be reading during this time—the principal, teachers, secretaries, the nurse, coaches—everyone!

If this were done in elementary and junior high, high school kids could then be assigned more challenging titles and have fun discussing them. But our high schools are now filled with students who read poorly and see reading as only a boring chore to avoid at all costs.

If you were chosen the Schools Chancellor, what would you do the first hour in office to change things?

Oh, what a tempting question! How about this: an edict mandating that school districts spend as much on librarians and reading material for the kids as they spend on administrators and their staff.


I see great-looking young adult books in the bookstores. They look edgy. Do school libraries get those? Do they get them while they're fresh?

I have really liked almost every school librarian I’ve ever met. They are often the only adult in the school who really values reading.

That said, school libraries are very underfunded, and the money they do get is being directed to computers and other technology. New young adult fiction is usually at the bottom of the funding list.

The other point is that often the books that really turn kids into readers are series, like Goosebumps or Vampire Academy; or category fiction, like mysteries or science fiction. These are really low status books, and librarians are often afraid to order them.


The title of one of your books is ‘How to Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired’. What's the deal? How could there be resistance to teaching a love of reading? How did you have to be careful when you weren't being careful?

Would you believe schools are still teaching Ethan Frome? And Great Expectations? From about sixth grade through high school, teachers are presented with a curriculum that requires them to teach books that most kids will hate.

I coach teachers on ways to avoid a poisonous, required curriculum, to get their students reading books they can love, and not get fired in the process. The critical element is that students need to be given the ability to choose most or all of their reading.

TVs, computers, cell phones, all that. Good or bad for reading?

TV: bad. Computers are better; at least they are reading a bit, and often writing, too. All of the texting that goes on with cell phones is probably good IF they are also avidly reading, since then they will acquire good grammatical structures they can use when they want to.


What reluctance did even English teachers evidence when you'd talk to them about your way of doing things?

English teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, with a required curriculum that mandates the teaching of certain books. The difficulty they have getting their whole class to read these books pales before the difficulty they envision managing a class where students can choose most of their reading.

And anyway, they have already read the books they are assigning. They have folders full of discussion questions, and tests, and vocabulary exercises on these books. Why on earth would they want to open their curriculum to books that kids choose—that maybe the teacher hasn’t read. How can she give them a test on it?

The fact that most students read little of these required books, or any other books with a required book hanging over their heads, simply doesn’t impact them. I think the reason is because most teachers don’t understand how important avid reading is for developing reading skills. So it doesn’t matter too much if students are not reading.

Are schools arranged correctly for reading?

No. Most schools are pretty sterile places. I would love to see schools with magazines in the cafeteria, comics in the nurse’s office, overflowing bookshelves lining the halls. I want to see piles of Soccer World and Sports Illustrated for Kids in the gym. I want the school buses to be awash with interesting reading material.

Why aren't kids breezing through books and reading assignments after 12 years?

This is really the heart of the issue. Kids don’t breeze through reading assignments because they don’t read well enough to do so. But since reading is a hidden skill—unlike, say, playing soccer—few people realize how poorly many children read. And they read poorly because they read so little.

Follow a child of any age throughout a school day, and see how much time this child spends in sustained, concentrated reading. Everything else in a school day is considered more important than just having a child sit and read for a block of time. Kids listen to lectures, discuss issues, answer questions, fill out worksheets, write essays . . . but just sit and read? No time for that. It’s so sad

OK, So I’m a Celtics Fan
Ray Allen is one of the reasons

From The Boston Globe:

He cannot remember what was in the contest jar - balls or jellybeans or other objects - but Celtics guard Ray Allen clearly recalls the prize he received as a first-grader at his Oklahoma elementary school.
“I won three books,’’ Allen said with a smile. “I remember I felt so proud that I won those three books, those books were mine.’’

Allen traces his love of reading to that moment, and it continues today, as he uses the pleasures of a good book to ease the boredom of long road trips or soothe a particularly bad loss. To the world, Allen’s identity is as an NBA superstar with a smooth 3-point shot. But in the locker room, on the road, or waiting for a game to start, he is the guy with his nose in a book.

Make No Mistake
Alice Munro is the best

Last issue, in talking about Nathan Englander’s spectacular new collection of stories, What We Talk About When We talk About Anne Frank, I mentioned my all-time favorite short story writers. There were maybe ten I listed. Big names. No surprise I picked them as my favorites. They’d be on everyone’s list.

But my list was incomplete. I left off Alice Munro. It was a mistake. I think I know why it happened. The ones who easily made the list were so predictable and excellent, they all seem to belong there together. Alice Munro is different from them. She’s not famous in the way they are. She doesn’t represent an era, or a style. To me she shines in her own kind of light. She‘s the best ever. Those who read her know that. If you haven’t read her, I envy you your discovery.