Happy to Be Back

Thank you for checking back!  And my apologies are in order:  though I carefully composed 8 blog-posts to be published automatically while I was gone, I learned upon my return that the automatic-publishing function had failed.  I'm sorry!  Thank you for your persistence. 

Readers, to quote a favorite poet:  I have been to Paris since we parted.  And Amsterdam, and the Cinque Terre, and Venice, Umbria, New Orleans, Austin--all spiced with heavy helpings of family, family, family.  This month of incredible, dazzling traveling (and interpersonal family dynamics in full, illuminating bloom) will keep me ruminating and writing for weeks and months to come.

But for now, I just wanted to share this happy news from David Brooks's column in today's NYTimes:

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

I was excited, because I'd returned from Austin, where my sister-in-law Cool Julie manages a bookstore, with a totebag full of books for my "Little Sister" Amara.  Julie hand-picked several novels that her female teen customers are finding hot right now, so here's hoping Amara likes some of them.  Usually, we book-shop together.  Amara picks the novels, and then we both read and discuss them.  (Readers, it has taken me outside my usual zones of taste.  Yeah.  But it has been pretty cool, too.)

David Brooks, of course (with whom I'd say I have a love-hate relationship, except it's more tepid than that) manages to use this good news about the efficacy of reading in the service of a larger argument that privileges hierarchies, elitism, and prestige, using the language of all the Great-Books proponents who've ever made you yawn. 

But still, good news is good news.  This summer, consider treating the disadvantaged teen of your choice to a dozen books of his or hers.  Let books make a difference.  Let the beauty you love be what you do.