Assigned versus unassigned reading

I've always believed in the joy of reading whatever I want, so I was very interested in this New York Times story yesterday about teaching literature. The question is: Should everyone in the class read the same book or should students choose their own books?

Times reporter Motoko Rich focuses on a middle school teacher in Jonesboro, Ga. Last fall instead of assigning To Kill a Mockingbird, Lorrie McNeill let her seventh- and eighth-grade students pick out their own books.

Some chose challenging titles but if they didn't, McNeill nudged them in that direction. A seventh-grader who started with R&B singer Chaka Khan's memoir moved on to Maya Angelou's autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Which, actually, is a very cool transition.

(I remember when I was in high school we had to pick a science fiction novel to read, a genre I still don't like very much, and I picked Planet of the Apes.)

The article does a good job of exploring all sides of the issue and of course, it's not an either-or situation. You can assign some books and let students choose others. And there are good points to be made for all sides.

Obviously, the best way to encourage a love of reading is to let kids read what they love. The easiest way to turn them off is to force-feed them a book about which they have absolutely no interest. Reading becomes a chore instead of a pleasure.

(I still have nightmares about trudging through The Brothers Karamazov in high school. Or was it Crime and Punishment? I can't remember. But I think it permanently turned me off from all Russian literature.)

On the other hand, there is something to be said for everyone being on the same page. It fosters discussion and gets students thinking. I have to admit, even though I read a lot most of the classic works of literature I've read were assigned to me when I was in school.

But there was one quote that struck me as kind of sad. Before beginning the project O'Neill felt compelled to warn her very supportive principal: "I am not sure how it’s going to pan out on the standardized tests.”

Even though it's not exactly a revelation that schools today teach to test, statements like that still make me cringe.

A New England reading list

Hey, it's almost summer - time for a reading list! Thanks to my friend Dan at Media Nation for pointing me to The Boston Globe's interactive list of the 100 Essential New England Books (evah, as Dan says).

Some of these seem a little too recent to be on a list of the 100 essential anything and others have a tenuous connection to the region. (I guess if the author is from New England or went to school here, that counts.)

I mean, I know Dan Brown grew up in New Hampshire and his protagonist teaches at Harvard but there's really nothing very New Englandish about The Da Vinci Code! Others seem suspiciously more about New York than Boston. (Catcher in the Rye?)

The most-read books, according to votes from readers, are, not surprisingly, a pair of children's classics: Make Way for Ducklings and Charlotte's Web. I'm glad to see some love for one of my childhood favorites, too: Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.

There are lots of books on the list I've read and loved, lots I've been meaning to read. I'm happy Our Town is included. I'll be seeing David Cromer's acclaimed production next month at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York. (Kind of a neat synergy when you think about it: a Chicagoan's take on small-town New Hampshire comes to New York.)

The book on the list that most people want to read: David McCullough's John Adams. The Globe's number-one book is one I'm embarrassed to admit I've never read: Moby-Dick. Although I think I have a copy - somewhere.

Dramatic decline

For the first time in 25 years, Americans are reading more literature, which is great. According to a report from the National Endowment for the Arts, 50.2 percent of U.S. adults said they read at least one novel, short story, play or poem in 2008.

Sadly, that increased reading isn't coming in poetry or drama. Only 2.6 percent of those readers picked up a play, down from 3.6 percent in 2002. Only 8.3 percent read a book of poetry, down from 12.1 percent in 2002. By comparison, nearly half of all adults read a novel or short story in 2008.

I remember reading quite a few plays in high school. As an adult, I rarely picked one up until recently, when I started going to the theatre more. Now, I routinely read plays I've seen on stage. But I've always had pretty varied reading habits.

I think part of the problem is that drama is segregated in the parts of libraries and bookstores where few readers venture. And plays are simply no longer a part of popular culture. If we don't hear about them, we're not going to read them.

Maybe if Oprah picked August: Osage County for her book club that would help give drama a boost. Or, A Raisin in the Sun, since this is the 50th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of Lorraine Hansberry's play. How about it, Ms. Winfrey?

Up in the air, nothing to read

I hardly ever fly anymore, but this column in the San Francisco Chronicle resonated with me. John Flinn, the paper's travel editor, wrote about being stuck on a 16-hour flight from Milan, Italy, without his iPod, with a video screen that conked out before takeoff, and with nothing, absolutely nothing, to read.

(He said there was nothing in the English-language section of the Milan airport bookstore except Danielle Steel and John Grisham. I don't know why Flinn didn't pick up some Grisham, he's a perfectly entertaining writer of suspenseful legal thrillers. And in an emergency, Danielle Steel's not that bad. Not that I'd know from firsthand reading experience, of course).

Flinn describes rummaging around in his bag for an Ambien to help him sleep, but he'd taken the last one in Italy. The only thing that worked on the video screen was the route map, so he fixated on that for awhile. At one point, his wife gets up to use the bathroom and he "dived for her paperback like a starving man going for a deep-dish pizza. I'd barely read two pages, though, before she returned and wrestled her book from me."

He also offers some tips for what to do if you find yourself in a similar situation: commit your passport to memory, try to figure out what all the fuss is about Sudoku, (I wish he'd tell me.) study the Skymall catalog, turn to the route map in the back of the in-flight magazine and memorize the names of all of the "stan" countries.

Some of the comments on the column were pretty good. One person suggested he could have used the time to write haiku, another recommended traveling with a pair of knitting needles and yarn to knit a pair of socks. (Although I bet you can't bring knitting needles on a plane anymore).

A couple of people said that they always travel with a journal or something else to write in. Having paper and pen handy certainly saved me from more than an hour of boredom last spring when I was in New York, by myself, standing in line to take the ferry to Ellis Island. I used the time to jot down some notes about Curtains, the show I'd seen the night before.

One holiday weekend, I didn't plan well and the only thing I had available was a copy of The Thin Red Line, a novel by James Jones about a fictional World War II battle between American and Japanese troops on Guadalcanal. (Jones is best known as the author of From Here to Eternity.) I don't really like war novels, so I'm not even sure why I took it out of the library. All I remember is, I read it pretty quickly and thought it was just okay. I probably finished it on Sunday, and the library was closed until Tuesday, and I couldn't get to someplace to buy a book.

And then there are practical considerations of deciding which book to bring. Is the book so short that you'll finish it too quickly? Is it too heavy to carry? The worst thing is being stuck with very big book you absolutely hate. This did happen to me once. In my case, it was a behemoth of a novel by David Foster Wallace called Infinite Jest. And it truly is a behemoth - 1,088 pages long. And it has footnotes!

Don't ask what possessed me to read it. I know it's kind of a cult classic, but its appeal is way beyond me. The plot centers around a film, Infinite Jest, that is so addictively entertaining, anyone who watches it loses all interest in doing anything else but viewing it repeatedly. I doggedly kept reading, hoping I'd find out what this mysterious movie was about. Well, the joke was on me. I never found the answer, but I did learn quite a bit about the competitive world of junior tennis, a key subplot of the novel.

Running out of reading material used to be a big fear of mine, but I've learned to have a book with me at all times, in case I'm stuck waiting in a doctor's office or who knows where. And now that I have an iPod filled with audiobooks, podcasts and music, the chances of finding myself in a situation like Mr. Flinn's are pretty slim. Still, I could relate. I've been there.

Caveat lector

File this under the literary deception du jour.

I was in Borders on Sunday and as I always do, I stopped by the table of new hardcovers. I'm often drawn to a cover, and I'll turn to the flap on the dust jacket to see what it's about. I remember looking at a book that had a picture of an older African-American woman with her arm around a young white girl. I skimmed the description, wasn't really interested, and moved on.

Well, I should have looked at it a little more closely. Margaret B. Jones, the author of Love and Consequences, a just-published and highly acclaimed memoir about growing up on the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, has admitted that she made it all up. It's a complete fake.

Apparently, Jones is not half white and half Native American. She never ran drugs for gang members and she was never a foster child. She never graduated from the University of Oregon, as it says on the book's dust jacket. Her real name is Margaret Seltzer and she graduated from a private high school in North Hollywood. According to the Times story detailing the deception, Seltzer's sister tipped off her publisher that the book was untrue.

In her review, obviously written before the fraud was discovered, the Times' Michiko Kakutani calls the book "remarkable." She wrote "Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood." Apparently, Seltzer did a better job than anyone realized. The Times also published a glowing profile, including pictures of Seltzer at home in Oregon with her 8-year-old daughter. What a great role model for the kid, huh?

Here's her explanation: “For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Sadly, this isn't the only recent example.

Last week, author Misha Defonseca admitted that her 1997 memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was a complete fabrication. In the book, Defonseca describes her experiences as a young Jewish girl in Belgium during World War II. She travels across Europe to flee the Nazis, accompanied by a protective pack of wolves. But it turns out that Defonseca isn't Jewish. Her parents were Catholic resistance fighters executed by the Nazis and she spent the war safely in Brussels with relatives.

Defonseca, who now lives in Massachusetts, released a statement through her lawyer: "Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish. . . . There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality - it was my reality, my way of surviving."

No doubt Defonseca did have a traumatic childhood. But fabricating a Holocaust memoir is a pretty repugnant thing to do. It denigrates the experiences of authentic survivors, and gives ammunition to the Holocaust deniers. And Defonseca isn't the only writer who's ever done it. Blake Eskin helped unmask an earlier deception, by an author named Binjamin Wilkomirski, which he writes about in Slate.

I don't think Defonseca or Wilkomirski are evil people. But somewhere along the line, they became unable to separate fantasy from reality. They needed help, not an advance from a publisher. But as Eskin writes, there's an inherent difficulty in unmasking this type of fraud. "Raising questions about the authenticity of someone's Holocaust testimony, however implausible it seems, is a joyless task."

And another author or two admitting that they faked their memoir shouldn't even surprise us anymore.

In January 2006, James Frey admitted altering large parts of his story of drug addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces, which had been featured as a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Oprah, who helped turn the book into a besteller, said later that she felt "conned" by Frey. "It's embarrassing and disappointing for me."

For his party Frey still maintains that the book is a memoir. "I think part of what happened with a number of the things in the book, is when you go through an experience like the one I went through you develop different coping mechanisms. I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was this image of myself that was greater than what I was."

In another famous case, Forrest Carter's 1976 Native American memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was unmasked as fiction in 1991. It turns out Carter was actually a white supremacist and former Klansman.

Dan T. Carter, a distant relative, wrote about how Carter became an author and remade himself in the process. "Unfortunately, "The Education of Little Tree" is a hoax. The carefully constructed mask of Forrest Carter -- Cherokee cowboy, self-taught writer and spokesman for Native Americans -- was simply the last fantasy of a man who reinvented himself again and again in the 30 years that preceded his death in 1979."

I guess we all embellish our lives a little bit at times, in fairly harmless ways. With each retelling of the story, the fish grows bigger, the obstacles we overcome get more difficult, our feeling of desperation increases. The difference is, most of us don't get book deals. And when you put your name on something, when you send it out for public consumption, well that's a whole different story.

One question that always gets asked whenever another one of these cases arises is, Why didn't the author simply write the book as fiction rather than pass it off as a true story? Maybe they think that a true story, or one with more harrowing details, will be more compelling, will sell better. In other cases, perhaps some authors, who've had deeply traumatic experiences, simply come to believe that what they've written is true. They can't tell the truth from a lie. In still other cases, perhaps they're just dishonest individuals who don't believe that they'll ever get caught.

Whatever the reasons, it's disturbing. These are stories that readers picked up in good faith, really wanting to believe that they were true, expecting that they were true. Sadly, I don't think the phenomenon is going to disappear anytime soon, so caveat lector.

Books without end

I'm a big Simon and Garfunkel fan. While I've never seen them perform, or Paul Simon alone, I did get to see Art Garfunkel in concert once, when I was in college, and he has a beautiful voice. But I didn't know that he's also a voracious reader and keeper of lists.

A few times I've tried to keep a list of book I've read or movies I've seen, or things I want to read or see, but I'm not organized or dedicated enough to keep it going. So I just find this kind of astounding. On his web site, Art has a list of every book he's ever read from June 1968 to the end of 2007.

The list numbers more than 1,000 - from The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in June 1968, to Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, at the end of 2007. It comes out to about two books a month. There's nothing for 2008 yet, so I don't know if Art's still compiling the list. I hope so. It would be a shame to stop now.

And wow, Art seems like a pretty serious guy, with very eclectic tastes. (If I had a list, let's just say there would be less Jean-Jacque Rousseau and more John Grisham.) His choices are pretty much all over the place: classic fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, autobiographies, history, philosophy, religion, current events, contemporary titles and works from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

If you don't want to look through all of the titles, Art has helpfully included 135 of his favorites, listed in the order in which they were read. There doesn't seem to be a pattern. The man really does read everything.

Some of his favorites are books I've enjoyed, too: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Doesn't everyone go through a Zen period when they're in college?) and Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. There's one I'd never heard of, but I may have to pick up now: Simon and Garfunkel: The Definitive Biography, by Victoria Kingston. That must be very weird, reading a book about yourself!

On the other hand, Art also reads a lot of books that sat on my shelves unread for years: James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And there are books I would only read if I were marooned on a desert island, like anything by Tolstoy or Jane Austen. (I do try to watch all the movies, though. Does that count?)

Art's tastes lean toward very serious, highbrow books, but apparently every once in awhile he indulges in something popular, just like the rest of us: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Stephen King's The Shining and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. He's also read Postcards from the Edge by Paul Simon's ex-wife Carrie Fisher.

Here's an article from The Guardian about Art's library. The writer, Nigel Smith, notes that he read Catch-22 in February 1969, while he was making his acting debut in Mike Nichols' movie adaptation. And I'm not sure if there's any connection, but in the month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, he read military historian Peter Paret's Understanding War.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Art says that he avoids fluff. "I read for the reading pleasure, not for the gold star. Reading is a way to take downtime and make it stimulating. If you’re in the waiting room of a dentist’s office and don’t want to twiddle your thumbs, you turn to Tolstoy.”

Ok, that's not exactly the reading material I'd take to the dentist, but here's to you, Mr. Garfunkel!

A new page?

When I read a book, I prefer to do it the old fashioned way: holding a bound volume in my hands. Amazon has come out with a new, $399 electronic reader, the Kindle, a "wireless portable reading device with access to more than 90,000 books, blogs, newspapers and magazines."

Personally, I don't know why someone would need to carry around 90,000 books. With an iPod, I can understand wanting to carry around a few thousand 3- or 4-minute songs, or an hourlong podcast. Plus, an iPod is about the size of a deck of cards, and the Nano is even smaller. And just as you probably don't want headphones in your ears all day, you probably don't want to be looking at the Kindle's screen for hours on end either.

Gizmodo has given the Kindle a mostly positive review. Larry Magid, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, also likes it, although he touches on some of the drawbacks including the price and an annoying black flash on the screen when you push a button to go to the next page. My friend Dan at Media Nation has weighed in on how the Kindle could affect newspapers (scroll down).

I remember in the early 1980s, when I left paper, typewriter and White-out behind and started working on a computer. It was a disorienting experience and I didn't think I'd ever get used it. I missed being able to hold what I'd written in my hands. It was a much more tactile experience.

While I eventually got used to writing on a computer, I doubt I'll ever feel comfortable reading a book on one, although I read plenty of newspaper and magazine articles online.

I own The Complete New Yorker on CD-ROM, so I have access to some great works of fiction and nonfiction that first appeared in the magazine, like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," and John Hersey's "Hiroshima." But "In Cold Blood" is over 300 pages. I'm not going to sit and read something that lengthy on a computer, even sitting on the couch with my laptop. I could probably buy a copy almost as cheaply as printing it out. (Although if I ever have an uncontrollable urge to read either one at 2 in the morning, I'm all set).

Granted, I haven't even seen a Kindle, much less tried one. Supposedly, the screen is better and easier on the eyes than previous attempts at electronic readers. It's lightweight and feels comfortable to hold. Maybe I'll fall in love with it. But right now, I don't think there's a replacement for holding a book in your hands, cracking the spine and turning the pages one by one.