Fascinating NYT article: Do School Libraries Need Books?

Here's a great article that puts the digital/print discussion in context of students and learning. Bravo to the Times for collecting a nice variety of commentary on this. Also, the posted reactions are just as enlightening as the article.

Just finished Oscar Wao --- Wow!

Saw Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on several lists, but it wasn't until two people -- folks who score very high on my they-know-a-good-book-when-they-read-one meter -- told me they deemed it the most important book they'd read lately that I sought it out. I think one of them used the word "tranformative."

I rarely buy books anymore (it's a librarian thing) but made a beeline to the bookstore when I discovered the reserve lists were too long at not one, two but three local libraries. It's one thing for some one to tell you X is a good book. It's quite another to have them say it's "important" and quite another thing again to hear it from two people. Not too far into it someone noticed the title on my email signature line and wrote back to echo the first two recommenders. Need I mention that none of these folks knew about each other? By then, I was very grateful I had it in my hand and rearranged my schedule yesterday to put in some time with it. I was not disappointed.

Oscar Wao is down right hypnotic. The narration pulled me through from page one without let up until the very end. Diaz's use of the second person point of view kind grabs you around the throat and he has no problem sustaining the level of intensity. Feels like something really important will happen on every very next page. And he does this while sliding fluidly between generations and settings. Felt like he could have easily kept going for another 300 pages.

Besides a great story, great characters and slick narrative structure, Diaz's book is brilliant this way, too:
Being a middle-age white girl from the suburbs of Buffalo (my husband calls it the Midwest), I couldn't help but feel a little left out of Diaz's story. My Spanish barely sufficed to wrap my head around the frequent injection of Dominican idiom and I'm sure I missed much. I was grateful for his employment of footnotes (which allow him to extend narrative tangents) to provide me with the historical and cultural context I needed. Diaz brilliantly, I think, included plenty of the universal to carry me through and make me wish I was more aware of the experience of families like the de Leons and the Cabrals. I, too, will be telling people this is an important book.

For younger readers and anyone who has lived a life anything like Oscar's or Oscar's family, Diaz's novel must read like the story that's being waiting too long to be told. It will speak directly to them. Literature is important because it reflects back our own culture, in all it's beauty and horror, and makes us better for it. Thank you, Junot Diaz, for writing this book.

Near the end of the novel, Diaz's narrator Yunior makes a passing reference to lovers of good books enjoying literary epiphanies. It seems to me Diaz wrote one.

Teens Like to Read if you let them Read what they Like

Last spring the school which employs me as a librarian, let me radically redesign our summer reading program. It took a bit of doing, but the basic design was -- and continues to be -- founded on the premise that teens will like to read if you let them read what they like. Teachers volunteered to sponsor titles and students were allowed to sign up for whichever teacher/title they wished. If they wanted to not decide -- and read any book they hadn't read before -- they signed up for a group in which everyone had read a different book. Armed with loads of discussion questions, teachers facilitated conversation about the variety of books.

Anyway, it was a resounding success! Sure we had some duds who didn't read anything, but most did. And they read great stuff, too! Here's the list of titles that were selected by teachers, sometimes at the suggestions of some of their students, sometimes based on their own individual book passion.

1984 by George Orwell
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Elfish Gene: Dungeons and Dragons and Growing Up Strange by Mark Barrowcliffe
The Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Godel's Proof by Ernest Nagel
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Hooked by Matt Richtel
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
Maus I by Art Spiegelman
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Paper Towns by John Green
Petey by Ben Mikaelsen
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer

I am in the process of making a suggestion list for this year. No one has to stick to it, but providing an annotated list of titles proved very helpful last year. I would welcome any suggestions.