Students Choosing Books

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

When you were a child, Martha, you probably had a favorite book, right?

When I was young, oh my gosh, there were so many of them.

I had an aunt who gave me children’s books every year, usually autographed by the author.

So wonderful books when I was really young.

Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey and Lentil and the Madeline series and the Snowy Day.

I mean, I could go on and on about that.

When I got a little older, it’s a classic.

It’s not that original, but Charlotte’s Web, for me, was a book that had everything.

You know, it had cute talking pigs and nerdy science appeal and a little spider trying to save a pig by writing words in a web.

Come on.

I mean, what could be better?

And a girl you could probably identify with, right?

That and the fact that, I mean, it was a good story.

And I think what I really loved about it is that it was a book that respected my intelligence at that age.

You know, I mean, at that age, you’re thinking about big questions like life and death and friendship and loyalty.

And I mean, how can you resist a book that starts out, where’s Papa going with that axe?

It’s terrible.

No, I mean.

But you hit on something there, too.

I think all of the books that I loved when I was a boy, from 5 to 10 to 15, even a little older than that,

They all had to do with shooting just a little higher.

Reading something was just a little bit outside my range.

Yes.

I was 11 when I tackled the Lord of the Rings series.

And God knows that I don’t think I understood most of it until a few years later when I had a little more life under my belt.

But The Hobbit, speaking of Tolkien, was a book that I was given as a gift when I was 10.

My grandmother gave it to me.

My cousins had suggested that it would be a good book for me.

And they were absolutely right because I had already had the reading habit,

But it introduced me to this idea that writing could be well done as well as well plotted.

Does that make sense?

Sure.

Because so much of the writing for children that I see, the young adult stuff, isn’t well written.

It might have a fantastic plot.

Good things happen and interesting situations occur.

But the writing itself is rather humdrum.

And they don’t seem to have thrown some $10 words in there just to kind of tweak the children,

Which is something I think you should do.

Tolkien had no problem doing that.

He knew that his audience was going to tend to be a little younger,

But he had no problem with that.

I was reminded of, thinking about this,

That there was an article in the New York Times that ran a little bit ago

Called Pick Books You Like,

And apparently there’s a trend in schools now

To allow children of varying ages to pick their own books for their reading classes.

I guess it’s language arts or whatever they’re calling it now.

This kind of leads to my point, Martha.

You and I are not alone in this.

Children get the reading habit early,

And the way they get the reading habit

Is to choose their own books, to choose stuff.

It can be the worst rubbish,

But the most important thing is that they read a lot.

There is no special type of book

That has been designated by some scientist

As the perfect learning experience

That goes straight into the brain

And suddenly makes the child smarter.

No, what happens is that they read at all.

They must read.

They must read anything as early as possible,

As often as possible,

And then, once they have their reading habit, you introduce those great books one at a time.

Well, if you’d like to talk about books you’ve loved or any other aspect of language, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.