"The barbershop is based on men coming together grooming each other to become better men, and I think books and education is a fundamental part of that," says Reggie Ross, the owner of Royal Touch Barbershop In Palm Beach County, Florida, where the shop is located, the graduation rate for African American boys is 50%. We also know that the less money one's family has the less likely there are books at home. So Ross offers his young visitors books to read while they wait and when they are in the chair. There is now television or radio to divert their...
The Joy of Reading: Canadian style
Created late last year, this infographic from our friends up north visualizes some of the benefits of leading a reading life. Good stuff.
The Ulysses of e-books is…
It is called the Hawking Index (HI) and it uses data from Amazon to determine which e-books are the most unfinished. The lighthearted study devised by Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, works like this: Take the page numbers of a book's five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we're guessing most people are likely to have read. The classic of this genre and the namesake of the index is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time,...
A Book Lover’s Lexicon
Using the informal Japanese word “Tsundoku,” which refers to the act of buying books and letting them pile up unread, as a jumping off point Molly Schoemann-McCann at the Barnes and Noble Book Blog comes up with 15 new words for the bibliophile. Afficted When something terribly sad has just happened in a book you are reading, and you want to burst into tears, but you know that you’ll feel ridiculous trying to explain yourself if anyone asks. Example: “I was so deeply afficted by the ending of Eleanor & Park that I had to bite my wallet to keep...
Doctor says: Read aloud to kids from day one
For the first time the American Academy of Pediatrics has weighed in on early literacy education and have come to recommend that reading aloud to your child should begin at birth. That's right at birth! Not when they start talking or walking but when they start breathing. They have asked the 62,000 pediatricians in the U.S. "to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor." As the the piece in the New York Times on the announcement reminds us: According to a federal government survey of children’s health, 60 percent of American children from families with incomes...