"An exhilarating volume that will ratchet up the joy for all reading groups "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished little magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe a life lived in and through literature....

"Twelve-year-old Kyle gets to stay overnight in the new town library, designed by his hero (the famous gamemaker Luigi Lemoncello), with other students but finds that come morning he must work with friends to solve puzzles in order to escape"--Provided by publisher.

Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure. Yet there is another equally important, though often overlooked, reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in which they instruct, cajole, and convince remains a subject of some mystery. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer prize-winning critic Michael Dirda shows...

Known for her popular blog, "The Book Whisperer," Donalyn Miller says she has yet to meet a child she couldn't turn into a reader. No matter how far behind Miller's students might be when they reach her 6th grade classroom, they end up reading an average of 40 to 50 books a year. She shares her teaching methods and includes a dynamite list of recommended "kid lit" that helps parents and teachers find the books that students really like to read.

Wolf considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy and reflection as we become increasingly dependent upon digital technologies. A decade ago, Wolf's Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Now that we are completely immersed in the internet and digital devices, our ways of processing language have altered dramatically....

Investigates the art of reading by examining each aspect of reading, problems encountered, and tells how to combat them.

At first, Trisha loves school, but her difficulty learning to read makes her feel dumb, until, in the fifth grade, a new teacher helps her understand and overcome her problem.

"A series of essays exploring the different books that shaped Gornick throughout her life"--