In love with books...

(I wrote the following blog for a class, explaining why the issue of censorship appealed to my research sensibilities):
My first memories are books! My parents read to me, they read to themselves. My mother thought there was something wrong with me because I would sit still for a very long time, looking at books, when I was eighteen months old. Books have sustained, informed, and inspired me. My parents let me read almost anything. I do remember one particular volume I brought home from the library when I was 11 that contained horror stories of people's heads being cut off. Dad made me take it back to the library...and he was right because it gave me nightmares and scared me for YEARS afterward. This is one of the incidents I think of when I hear about books being challenged. "Book banning" in my household was done judiciously, seldom, and kept in the private sphere. My dad did not, for example, go down to the library and demand the book taken off the shelves. This would have moved the act of parental supervision into the public sphere. (Photo by Christopher Tovo)

By the time I was in second grade, I was reading CS Lewis and Mark Twain. We had just moved to a tiny Arkansas town from the Bay Area in California. The first thing I did was ride my bike down to the library to get a library card. This little library was run by a stern Danish woman. She had divided the library into 2 sections: children/young adult and adult. After one year, I had either read or was disinterested in most the books in the young adult section. But any attempt to cross the library floor to get to the adult section was frowned upon by the librarian. She would send me back to the children's/YA section, no matter how I tried to reason with her. I knew she wouldn't let me check out any of the adult books, but I wanted to look through them, because many of them were on my reading level PLUS I just wanted to skim the titles! Eventually, I came up with a brilliant scheme. The librarian's desk sat in the center of the area between the children/YA and adult area so that she could keep an eye on the kids. However, short bookshelves of reference materials and old yearbooks was against the back wall, opposite the librarian's desk, with enough space behind the shelving for one skinny 10 year old. So I'd act like I was lounging in the YA section until something or someone caught the librarian's eye (I WISH I could remember her name- she was still there in 2005 when I visited), then I would crawl behind the reference shelves and emerge in the adult section. She could not see into the adult section from her desk because of the way the adult bookshelves were arranged. Brilliant! I made myself comfortable and browsed through anatomy books, spicy romances, and - once (hallelujah!) - Our Bodies Ourselves.

I love libraries- I love the collection of questionable and controversial texts next to garden guides and Nancy Drews. Legislate morality under your own roof if you must but keep out of my library!






And in other thoughts- OH MY this book looks awesome!

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, integrates psychology and archaeology, linguistics and education, history and neuroscience in a truly path-breaking look at the development of the reading brain-a complicated phenomenon that Wolf seeks to chronicle from both the early history of humanity and the early stages of an individual's development ("unlike its component parts such as vision and speech... reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations"). Along the way, Wolf introduces concepts like "word poverty," the situation in which children, by age five, have heard 32 million less words than their counterparts (with chilling long-term effects), and makes time for amusing and affecting anecdotes, like the only child she knew to fake a reading disorder (attempting to get back into his beloved literacy training program). Though it could probably command a book of its own, the sizable third section of the book covers the complex topic of dyslexia, explaining clearly and expertly "what happens when the brain can't learn to read." One of those rare books that synthesizes cutting edge, interdisciplinary research with the inviting tone of a curious, erudite friend (think Malcolm Gladwell), Wolf's first book for a general audience is an eye-opening winner, and deserves a wide readership.
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