Book News
Too wordy, too soon?
Children are no longer reading children’s books. Children’s picture books, that is — which is an even bigger outrage.
Apparently, booksellers are reporting that thanks to pressure from demanding parents, children are spending less and less time reading picture books and are moving straight into text-heavy, pictureless chapter books — some as early as age 4.
“I see children pick up picture books, and their parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this,’ ” Dara La Porte, a bookstore manager in Washington, told The New York Times.
“It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that ‘somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.’ “
First Lines
Blood Count: An Artie Cohen Mystery, by Reggie Nadelson
Harlem, Nov. 4, 2008 — election night.
On a dark side street in Harlem, a silver van suddenly appears out of nowhere. Its wheels spinning, it seems to move with a life of its own, down the empty street, past the quiet brownstones and the old trees shedding their leaves.
I’ve been driving around for a while, looking for a place to park. Election night. A balmy Indian summer night in November. The sounds of the city getting ready to explode with joy, especially here in Harlem. Overhead, long beams from the arc lights on 125th Street play on the sky, the night lit up like day.
From somewhere close by comes the noise of celebration: shouting and laughter, fireworks, sparklers, music. From someplace, music — R&B, rap, Dixieland, all-enveloping — drifts through the open window of my car as I turn into 152nd Street, see an empty spot, cut across the street to grab it.
It’s tight. I back in sharp as I can, trying to fit my ancient Caddy, big boat of a car, into the space, and it’s only then I notice the van.
It comes from around the corner, comes up behind me after I’ve parked, I think. Gathering speed, it passes me, rolling down the hilly street toward Harlem River Drive.
Up here in Sugar Hill, on good days, if you’re high up in a tall building, you can see down the broad boulevards to the midtown skyline, almost down to Ground Zero, the hole in the city that is still empty after seven years.
If I hadn’t found a spot to park that night, if I’d just given up, gone home, watched the election returns on TV, maybe none of it would have happened — not what happened then, not what followed six weeks later.
Hardcover Best Sellers
Fiction
1. Safe Haven, by Nicholas Sparks
2. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
3.The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
4. Bad Blood, by John Sandford
5. Wicked Appetite, by Janet Evanovich
Nonfiction
1. Earth (The Book), by Jon Stewart
2. The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
3. Pinheads and Patriots, by Bill O’Reilly
4. S— My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern
5. The Orange Revolution, by Adrian Gostick
Publishers Weekly
