“We all like to be shocked and startled”: Tatar, interview.
“By portraying wonderful and frightening worlds”: Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 38.
“When we come out of a book, we’re different”: Jacqueline Woodson, extemporaneous remarks at Library of Congress ceremony attended by author, January 9, 2018.
“There is no more dynamic teacher”: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 123.
“Listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan”: Hurston, 123.
abolitionist and writer Fredrick Douglass: Manguel, History of Reading, 280–81.
“Slavery proved as injurious to her”: Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ch. 7, http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Frederick_Douglass/The_Narrative_of_the_Life_of_Frederick _Douglass/Chapter_VII_p1.html.
future missionary and preacher Thomas Johnson: Manguel, History of Reading, 281.
“Being caught reading anything”: Maria Popova and Claudia Zoe Bedrick, eds., A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (Brooklyn: Enchanted Lion, 2018), 58.
Chen was born: Chen Guangcheng, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 15–17.
spent his time trapping frogs: Chen, 36, 39–42.
In the horror and tumult of the next decade: Stanley Karnow, Mao and China: A Legacy of Turmoil (New York: Penguin, 1990), 191–99.
“My father and I would sit under the kerosene lamp”: Chen, Barefoot Lawyer, 43–45.
“The stories my father read to me”: Chen, interview by author, May 17, 2017.
Chapter 7: Reading Aloud Furnishes the Mind
“We almost never take this out”: Christine Nelson, interview by author, October 5, 2016.
This beautiful object: The Perrault manuscript can be seen at http://www.themorgan.org/collection/charles-perrault/manuscript.
possibly Perrault’s son, Pierre: Morgan Library & Museum CORSAIR online collection catalog, accessed April 10, 2018, http://corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=143572.
“the golden net-work of oral tradition”: This phrase originates with the American folklorist William Wells Newall and is cited in the opening pages of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar, The Annotated African American Folktales (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
According to Bruno Bettelheim: Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 168.
the moment of the grandmother’s destruction: The tiny painting—which can be seen at http://www.themorgan.org/collection/charles-perrault/59—must, in my opinion, shows the grandmother right before the wolf eats her. After all, the grandmother is the only character in the story who is surprised in her bed. Confusingly, however, the woman in the picture wears a red cap on her head, which gives rise to the possibility that she is not in fact the grandmother but Little Red Riding Hood herself.
“If you want your children to be intelligent”: Exuding amiable skepticism, Stephanie Winick discusses the famous quotation in “Einstein’s Folklore,” Library of Congress Folklife Today, December 18, 2013, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2013/12/einsteins-folklore/.
“a longing for”: C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 29–30.
“acquire a sense of horizons “: John McWhorter made this remark in the context of college students tempted to retreat into “safe spaces” rather than children who are still living at home and having stories read to them. I have borrowed it because it’s elegant and it fits: a child’s horizon-stretching can’t start too soon! For McWhorter’s full discussion, see Conor Friedersdorf, “A Columbia Professor’s Critique of Campus Politics,” Atlantic, June 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/a-columbia-professors-critique-of-campus-politics/532335/.
“all the books on the shelves were mine”: Claire Kirch, “Junot Díaz Urges Booksellers to Walk the Talk on Diversity,” Publishers Weekly, January 25, 2018.
“We all come from the past”: Russell Baker, Growing Up (New York: Plume, 1982), 8.
Savage of Aveyron: Mary Losure, Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2013)
the terrible Tudors: Terry Deary, Terrible Tudors and Slimy Stuarts (New York: Scholastic, 2009).
“Tradition is to the community”: John O’Donohue, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty,” interview by Krista Tippett, On Being, NPR, rebroadcast August 6, 2015, https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/.
Many of the best-known ditties: Katherine Elwes Thomas, The Real Personages of Mother Goose (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1930).
embedded all over the place: Mary Roche has a good description of the phenomenon of “intertextuality,” or the cross-referencing of stories and ideas, in Developing Children’s Critical Thinking, 93–95.
entry point to language: This point is widely made, including in Dickinson et al., “How Reading Books Fosters Language Development,” 2.
“Tucked inside ‘Hickory, dickory’”: Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 99.
“Children get a real kick”: Fox, Reading Magic, 92–93.
variants of Beauty and the Beast: Tatar, Beauty and the Beast.
The neutrality of their characters: Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 40.
“These tales are the purveyors of deep insights”: Bettelheim, 26.
“wondrous because”: Bettelheim, 19.
“will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam”: P. L. Travers’s 1943 review ran in the New York Herald Tribune and was featured in a 2014 exhibition of Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations at the Morgan Library & Museum. It is reproduced at the end of Edward Rothstein, “70 Years on, Magic Concocted in Exile,” New York Times, January 23, 2014, and also excerpted, with other contemporaneous reviews, in Dan Sheehan, “A Children’s Fable for Adults: Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince,” Literary Hub, July 31, 2017, http://bookmarks.reviews/a-childrens-fable-for-adultsantoine-de-saint-exuperys-the-little-prince/.
“No one can possibly tell what tiny detail”: Quoted in Tatar, Enchanted Hunters, 27.
“We think the problem is that these classics”: Jack Wang, interview by author, April 25, 2016.
A wordless picture book gave researchers: Yana Kuchirko, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Rufan Luo, Eva Liang, “‘What Happened Next?’: Developmental Changes in Mothers’ Questions to Children,” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 16 (August 17, 2015), https://doi.org/10/1177/1468798415598822.
“The Chinese moms tended”: Tamis-LeMonda, interview.
A little later, in the midcentury afterglow: Leonard S. Marcus, Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books (New York: Golden Books, 2007).
“Making a connection to art is huge”: Amy Guglielmo, interview with the author, February 16, 2016.
“When children have seen a painting”: The Touch the Art books, originally published by Sterling, are due, as of this writing, to reappear in autumn 2019 in revamped form under the series title Peek-a-Boo Art, to be published by Orchard Books/Scholastic US.
“With Rapunzel, I was definitely showing children”: Paul O. Zelinsky, interview with the author, February 10, 2016.
“Look at that landscape”: Eik Kahng, Ellen Keiter, Katherine Roeder, David Wiesner, David Wiesner and the Art of Wordless Storytelling (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2017), 17.
“It was a story I knew very well”: Christine Rosen, interview with the author, September 12, 2016.
“makes your brain go tick”: Jane Doonan, “Close Encounters of a Pictorial Kind,” review of Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Books, by Perry Nodelman, Children’s Literature Vol. 20, 1992, accessed through Project Muse: ht
tps://muse.jhu.edu/article/246257/pdf.
“If we want to be able”: Jonathan Cott, There’s a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 162.
“Interpreting pictures fully”: Jane Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books (Stroud: Thimble Press, 1993), 8.
“I don’t think you should do Pride and Prejudice”: Wang, interview.
Accepting one of these accolades: Walter D. Edmonds, “Acceptance Paper,” in Newbery Medal Books, 1922–1955, ed. Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field (Boston: Horn Book, 1955), 223.
Still, we are wise not to assume: The nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill is characteristically excellent on this point, writing in On Liberty, “Yet it is as evident in itself, as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than individuals—every age having held opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.”
Thomas Bowdler: Williams, Social Life of Books, 178–80.
small Chicago publisher: NewSouth Books, which published the bowdlerized editions of Twain, defended its editorial choices shortly before the books came out in early 2011: “We saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.”
“Twain used the ‘n-word’”: Amy Guth, “Epithets Edited out of ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ‘Finn,’” updated by Courtney Crowder, Chicago Tribune, January 5, 2011.
“How to acknowledge an author’s darker side”: Miller, Magician’s Book, 171.
a notorious scene: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, illustrator Garth Williams (New York: Harper Trophy, 1994), 257–59.
in an episode: Bewitched: season 2, episode 26, “Baby’s First Paragraph,” March 1966, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0523058/.
“Great art has often”: Camille Paglia, “Camille Paglia on Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality: ‘Endless, Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead,’” Hollywood Reporter, February 27, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/camille-paglia-movies-metoo-modern-sexuality-endless-bitter-rancor-lies-1088450.
“History, after all, is people”: Elizabeth Janet Gray, “Acceptance Paper,” in Miller and Field, Newbery Medal Books, 240.
“gives us a profound sense”: Gray, 239.
Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House: I am grateful to Bruce Handy for reminding me of this wonderful book, the first in a series. Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (Los Angeles: Disney/Hyperion, 2002).
“If all mankind minus one”: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), 21.
One of the best models: Virgil M. Hillyer, A Child’s History of the World (Hunt Valley, MD: Calvert Education Services, 1997), 163–65.
Chapter 8: From the Nursery to the Nursing Home: Why Reading Aloud Never Gets Old
“It is really hard to sit”: Linda Khan, conversation with the author, December 2017.
“When I was a kid [my mother] would read to me”: Michelle Homer, Deborah Duncan, “Emotional Neil Bush on his mother’s life and legacy,” KHOU, April 16, 2018, https://www.khou.com/article/news/community/emotional-neil-bush-on-his-mothers-life-and-legacy/285-540211907.
a charming account in the New Yorker: Niccolo Tucci, “The Great Foreigner,” New Yorker, November 22, 1947, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1947/11/22/the-great-foreigner.
“I believe that one of the strongest motives”: Albert Einstein, “Principles of Research,” a celebrated toast that Einstein delivered in honor of Max Planck’s 60th birthday celebration, http://www.neurohackers.com/index.php/fr/menu-top-neurotheque/68-cat-nh-spirituality/99-principles-of-research-by-albert-einstein.
an unpleasant surprise: Lauri Hornik, conversation with author, January 9, 2018; follow-up phone interview, January 26, 2018.
“Literature must be taken and broken to bits”: Vladimir Nabokov, “Nabokov on Dostoyevsky,” New York Times Magazine, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html.
One June afternoon: The reading group was held at the Michael Sobell Jewish Community Center, Golders Green Road, London.
“rich, varied, non-prescriptive diet of serious literature”: Josie Billington et al., “An Investigation into the Therapeutic Benefits of Reading in Relation to Depression and Well-Being,” University of Liverpool, 2010, https://www.thepilgrimtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/MERSEY BEAT-Executive-Summary.pdf.
feelings of relaxation: In an interesting unrelated study, below, researchers teased apart the social-emotional effects of fiction and nonfiction, finding that “exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support.” Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley, and Jordan B. Peterson, “Exploring the Link Between Reading Fiction and Empathy: Ruling Out Individual Differences and Examining Outcomes,” Communications 34, no. 4 (2009): 407–28, doi: 10.1515/COMM.2009.025.
“This effect is likely because books engage”: Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade, and Becca Levy, “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity,” Social Science & Medicine 164 (September 2016): 44–48.
A 2017 paper from clinicians: Josie Billington et al., “A Literature-Based Intervention for Older People Living with Dementia,” evaluation report, Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society, University of Liverpool, August 15, 2017, https://issuu.com/emmawalsh89/docs/a-literature-based-intervention-for.
“Experience and use of language do matter”: Christiansen, Skype conversation.
sharpen cognitive skills: Rui Nouchi et al., “Reading Aloud and Solving Simple Arithmetic Calculation Intervention (Learning Therapy) Improves Inhibition, Verbal Episodic Memory, Focus Attention and Processing Speed in Healthy Elderly People: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 (May 17, 2016), doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00217.
“It is almost as if literature ‘raises the bar’”: “Connect Realise Change: The Reader,” https://vdocuments.site/connect-realise-change-high-quality.html.
loneliness as a cultural phenomenon: Vivek Murthy, “Work and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Harvard Business Review, September 2017.
Lonely hearts face double the mortality risk: European Society of Cardiology Press Office, “Loneliness is Bad for the Heart,” June 9, 2018, https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/loneli ness-is-bad-for-the-heart?hit=wireek.
Dogs do, too: Andy Newman, “How to Heal a Traumatized Dog: Read It a Story,” New York Times, June 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/how-to-heal-a-traumatized-dog-read-it-a-story.html.
“Ten or fifteen years ago”: Victoria Wells, ASPCA, interview by author, October 3, 2016.
“You read something which you thought”: James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Hoboken: Melville House, 2014).
Antyllus thought it was: Manguel, History of Reading, 60–61.
He had the fanciful idea: Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 11.
Chapter 9: There Is No Present Like the Time
a middle-class family, the Rashids: Julie and Alex Rashid and their children, interviews by author, May 29 and September 11, 2016.
A 2017 study, “Learning on Hold”: Jessa Reed et al., “Learning on Hold: Cellphones Sidetrack Parent-Child Interactions,” Developmental Psychology 53 (August 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28650177.
“Even with technology in our lives”: Klass, interview.
we don’t know exactly what influence: Abubakar, interview.
&
nbsp; “There are few things that feel to a person”: LeVar Burton, “Levar Burton Reads to You,” interview with Lauren Ober, The Big Listen, NPR, November 23, 2017, https://biglisten.org/shows/2017-11-23/levar-burton-reads.
In a nanosecond: True story! This took place late in the afternoon of March 30, 2016.
“This memory made my family realize”: Annie Holmquist, email exchange with author, August 2, 2017.
“I think it is great”: Carolyn Siciliano, interview by author, June 5, 2016.
a subtle technique: Alter, Irresistible, 272–73.
As a fellow enthusiast said: It was Walter Olson.
Researchers at NYU have observed: Tamis-LeMonda, interview.
developmental psychologists who argue: Pinker, Village Effect, 181.
“I ask myself, why did I stop”: Amelia DePaolo, interview by author, July 20, 2017.
“I said to her, ‘I was thinking’”: Lauri Hornik, interview by author, January 26, 2018.
a quaint volume: Walter Taylor Field, Fingerposts to Children’s Reading (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1907), cited in Annie Holmquist, Intellectual Takeout, November 9, 2015, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/5-tips-1907-turning-your-child-reader.
“a special time with their parents”: Of children ages six to seventeen, 78 percent chose “It is/was a special time with my parent” as their top reason for why they enjoyed being read to. Scholastic, Kids & Family Reading Report, 5th ed., 35.
“need to feel competent at what they do”: Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016), 22.
Afterword
“It is only with the heart”: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (London: Egmont, 2012), 68.
“astonished by a sudden understanding”: Saint-Exupéry, 73–74.
When the writer and illustrator Anna Dewdney: Shannon Maughn, “Obituary: Anna Dewdney,” Publishers Weekly, September 6, 2016, http://publishersweekly.tumblr.com/post/150056066571/childrens-author-illustrator-and-educator-anna.
“When we read with a child”: Anna Dewdney, “How Books Can Teach Your Child to Care,” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/08/07/why-reading-to-children-is-crucial-not-just-for-literacy/.
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