How We Read Now

"The digital revolution has transformed reading. Onscreen text, audiobooks, podcasts, and videos often replace print. We make these swaps for pleasure reading, but also in schools. How We Read Now is a ringside seat to the impact of reading medium on learning. Teachers, administrators, librarians, and policymakers need to make decisions about classroom materials. College students must weigh their options. And parents face choices for their children. Digital selections are often based on cost or convenience, not educational evidence. Current research offers essential findings about how print and digital reading compare when the aim is learning. Yet the gap between what scholars and the larger public know is huge. How We Read Now closes the gap. The book begins by sizing up the state of reading today, revealing how little reading students have been doing. The heart of the book connects research insights to practical applications. Baron draws on work from international researchers, along with results from her collaborative studies of student reading practices ranging from middle school through college. The result is an impartial view of the evidence, including where the jury is still out. The book closes with two challenges. The first is that students increasingly complain print is boring. And second, for all the educational buzz about teaching critical thinking, digital reading is inherently ill-suited for cultivating these habits of mind. Since screens and audio are now entrenched - and valuable - platforms for reading, we need to rethink how to help learners use them wisely"--

“How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.” “A book that doesn’t seek to shut down the current literary discourse so much as shake it up.” (The New York Times Book Review) Offering “its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity — a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return." (Los Angeles Times) "I gasped, shouted, and holler-laughed while reading these essays from the phenomenal Elaine Castillo. What powerful writing, what a rigorous mind. For as long as I live, I want to read anything Castillo writes, and you probably do, too." —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words—beautiful, aspirational—are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, “she moves to wrest reading away from the cotton-candy aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.” (Vulture) How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico. At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman’s reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy—within ourselves, and with each other.

"The digital revolution has transformed reading. Onscreen text, audiobooks, podcasts, and videos often replace print. We make these swaps for pleasure reading, but also in schools. How We Read Now is a ringside seat to the impact of reading medium on learning. Teachers, administrators, librarians, and policymakers need to make decisions about classroom materials. College students must weigh their options. And parents face choices for their children. Digital selections are often based on cost or convenience, not educational evidence. Current research offers essential findings about how print and digital reading compare when the aim is learning. Yet the gap between what scholars and the larger public know is huge. How We Read Now closes the gap. The book begins by sizing up the state of reading today, revealing how little reading students have been doing. The heart of the book connects research insights to practical applications. Baron draws on work from international researchers, along with results from her collaborative studies of student reading practices ranging from middle school through college. The result is an impartial view of the evidence, including where the jury is still out. The book closes with two challenges. The first is that students increasingly complain print is boring. And second, for all the educational buzz about teaching critical thinking, digital reading is inherently ill-suited for cultivating these habits of mind. Since screens and audio are now entrenched - and valuable - platforms for reading, we need to rethink how to help learners use them wisely"--

I Can Read Now! is the perfect starting point for young children to learn about the building blocks of language and sentence structure. Through sound, sight, color, and repetition, this engaging book teaches kids 150 of the most commonly used sight words and their companion words so that children can start to form connections between language and the world around them. With this helpful resource, kids will begin to understand how to describe things in the world around them: their pets, their experience at the park, their parents, their trip to the zoo, and more! Featuring full-color illustrations as well as detailed step-by-step, word-for-word sentence building, I Can Read Now! will captivate young ones with its delightful artwork. This wonderful book will give them the foundation for a great education and a life full of language

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

Features Sharpen Your Reading Skills provides explicit instruction as well as extensive practice and recycling. Be an Active Reader features high-interest readings that allow students to apply their skills. As You Read activities, including completion of charts, graphs, and outlines, encourage reading with a purpose. Sharpen Your Vocabulary Skills includes word-attack skills ranging from Using a Dictionary to Using Context Clues. Express Your Ideas and Explore the Web extend and enrich the reading experience. Read Faster helps build reading fluency and accuracy. Practice with word parts, synonyms and antonyms, idioms, compound words, and word maps.

This unique program teaches listeners how to "decode" and reply to non-verbal signals from friends and business associates when those signals are often vague and thus frequenly ignored

Have you heard about behavioral economics? Don't be scared; it's fun, exciting, and interesting. This book is a summary of some of the best and most recent research in the quickly growing field of behavioral economics. I read the original research studies and put only the best and most brilliant ideas together in a fun, easy to read, and inspiring book. There are cute little illustrations, visual aids, and all the research is cited. Use it as a reference guide of great research, to share wonderful ideas, or simply as an entertaining read. It is going to be so fun! I hope you'll join me. You will find the information useful, fascinating, and maybe it will explain ourselves and fellow humans just a little bit more. I've worked hard to make this book an excellent value by keeping the price low, and it filling with almost 500 pages of love and useful information. Thanks, Guthri

"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 literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

'The most perceptive book I have ever read about the female interior' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Identifiable, heart-breaking and wickedly funny. I'd say this is one of my favourite books of the year' GIOVANNA FLETCHER 'Bourne holds a mirror up to contemporary aspiration' SUNDAY TIMES ***** Everyone wants to be Tori Bailey. A straight-talking, bestselling author, she's inspired millions of women around the world with her self-help memoir and uplifting posts online. What's more, her perfect relationship with her long-term boyfriend is the envy of all their friends. But Tori isn't being honest. While everyone around her is getting engaged and having babies, Tori's boyfriend will barely look at her, let alone talk about marriage. And when her best friend Dee unexpectedly falls in love, suddenly Tori's in danger of being left behind. Tori's built a career out of telling women how to live their best life, but is she brave enough to admit it's not what she wants? ***** The debut adult novel by bestselling author Holly Bourne is a blisteringly funny, honest and moving exploration of love, friendship and navigating the emotional rollercoaster of your thirties. Everyone is raving about this book! Brutally honest, appallingly funny and very moving - so accurate on the female interior, and the loneliness life in the public gaze. I want to read everything Holly Bourne has written now' ROSIE WALSH 'It'll resonate with anyone trying to convince themselves that sticking it out is better than being alone.' EMERALD STREET 'Relatable for any woman navigating emotional time bombs' RED 'It speaks so many truths about being a woman in your thirties; friendships, love and what a fickle beast social media can be. ' CLEMMIE HOOPER 'Hilarious and painfully true' GRAZIA 'Sure toresonate with anyone navigating the emotional minefield of their thirties'RED ONLINE 'Funny, real and heartbreaking. I haven't been this obsessed with a book in years.' LUCY VINE 'Injected with such reality it can't help but be hilarious'TIMES 'A very funny novel that lives up to its hype' THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH