(no subject)

[darkelf105]

So I finished John Connolly's "The Book Of Lost Things". I must say, this is a  recommendable book. It's prose is clean and sure without any of the literary pyrotechnics some writers are wont to use and the subject matter is very deep and dark. The story follows the journey of a boy into madness and explores growing up, trauma, grief, loss and love with fairytales. David enters a crack in a wall of a sunken garden in his new home and is transported to a nameless world where he is tested and found to be worthy of adulthood. This book reminded me of "The Neverending Story" mixed with "Ink Spell" and Phillip Pullman's "The Golden Compass". 

I also finished E.D. Hirsch's slim volume titled "The Knowledge Deficit". It's about the state of American education. The thrust of Mr. Hirsch's main argument is that we as American's do not teach reading to children. We teach reading as if it were a skill that could be applied to every text and thus every text be understood by every child. Except that neuroscience tells us differently. After the initial success we have with our students by teaching them to decode through phonics, children become stuck and mired by the reading process. Despite spending ninety or so minutes of classroom time a day on reading, America's reading scores remain dismal after the fourth grade. Mr. Hirsch points out that neuroscientists tell us that the key to reading well is, well, knowledge. We cannot read that which we know nothing about. Language is a complicated thing with many nuances and most children lack a necessary background in factual historical, scientific, vocabulary, and cultural knowledge to be able to read and comprehend---not just decode. He argues that we are hurting our children immensely when we take time away from science lessons, the arts, and history to teach basic decoding skills and conscious reading strategies. From what we have learned about how the brain works, teaching children to use a conscious reading strategy may actually be more HARMFUL than helpful because the brain has only so many mental resources available to it, and that by urging children to consciously use a strategy while reading, we are actually taking away from the business of reading. "The Knowledge Deficit" is a fascinating book and I urge anyone concerned with the state of American schools and intellectual propensity to give it a read. I know that I looked up the title after a grown woman came into the library where I worked and asked me what Vietnam was. She had no grasp of where Asia was, no sense of history and no ability to connect cruscial dots so that she could understand a film like "Apocalypse Now" (which she had at first mistaken for a title in "The Left Behind" series). And this woman wasn't dumb, she just didn't proper background knowledge to understand the movie or what I was trying to tell her (although she also lacked shame at not knowing or curiousity when I offered to find her more materials about the country and the American Vietnam war).

I stared a polemic called "Against Love", mainly because the premise of the work compares our psychotic national work ethic to the way we understand our relationships. The author argues that love is not something that needs to be "worked on" or have "time put in" or any of the other various things we say when we speak of out intimate realationships. The book is interesting because it is a blend of social theory, labor rights, feminism and psychoanalysis in an attempt to show why maybe, love isn't everything and it doesn't conquer all. I haven't finished yet, but so far Laura Kipnis has written a funny, mordant, and erudite polemic railing against one of modernity's most sacred of institutions. I recommend reading before one plans a wedding that cost more than some people's college tuition or cars.

I went to Borders the other day and spent <lj user=rokk_lobster>'s one hundred dollar gift card. I bought "Truth" (which is about the history and reasoning behind "truth), "Bisexuality in Classical Times", "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword", "The Popol Vuh", "A Canticle For Leibowitz", "Nocturnes" (a short story collection of John Conolly's),  the Norton critical edition of "The Decameron" and of course volume four of  "Alice 19th" becuase what trip to the bookstore is complete without a daily dose of manga? Haven't started any of them yet though :(.

And finally all of the books I ordered on reading came through from Clevenet in the past tow days. I think I will start with Scott Carpenter's "Reading Lessons" as it seems to be the most accessible.