|
|
While I still try to avoid politics here, sometimes it invades the realm I’m more intent on carving out. Via three percent, I learn of this story in Publishers Weekly:
President Bush’s proposed 2009 budget eliminates all the funding for Reading Is Fundamental’s book distribution program that has, since 1966, provided more than 325 million books to more than 30 million underprivileged children.
For a president who is so concerned about “Is our children learning?” and whose wife is promoted on the White House web site as a former librarian with “a special place in her heart for books,” there should be some insight into how key reading is to education. Even the White House paean to Laura Bush’s devotion to books and libraries says “a love of books … goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.” PW notes another irony: Barbara Bush was on RIF’s Board of Directors from 1980 to 1988 and Laura Bush was on its National Advisory Council from 1996 to 2001.
One of RIF‘s programs is aimed at giving young kids the opportunity to choose and keep two to five books per year at no cost to them or their families. Many of the kids benefited by RIF are from families who may not have the means to buy books or where reading is not a key part of family life or the parents themselves have reading difficulties. All together, in its last fiscal year alone, RIF got 16.6 million books in the hands of 4.6 million children. Just it South Dakota, more than 43,000 books were distributed to nearly 12,000 children.
Some may say this is something that should be funded privately, not by the government. (Is that why John Thune is the only member of our Congressional delegation who didn’t sign on to a letter to the appropriations committees supporting RIF funding?) RIF has plenty of corporate and organizational sponsors and support but it isn’t enough. Our nation has long recognized that education is a principal function of government. This situation involves a very simple proposition. If you can read, you not only are better able to learn, you probably can learn almost anything. Certainly, helping young children read (and, hopefully, develop a love for it) enables a greater ability to learn and makes it a crucial part of providing an education.
If we can spend $341 million a day in Iraq, certainly we can justify investing $26 million a year to foster something crucial to success not only in school, but in life.
No skill is more crucial to the future of a child, or to a democratic and prosperous society, than literacy.
Reading By 9 Child Literacy Initiative
I noted yesterday The Telegraph‘s list of the 110 books it considers “the perfect library.” Perhaps further proving I am an illiterati, I evidently have not spent enough time in that library.
I’ve read only 17 of the books on the list — and more than a third were SF novels. I’m not going to repeat the full list here because it’s worth spending some time perusing and critiquing (or nit picking). Here’s how I fared in the 11 categories:
CLASSICS: 0/10. Looking at the list, I speculate any I may have read were in the Classics Illustrated series.
POETRY: 0/10. Not surprising at all as I would be the first to admit I’ve never really developed an appreciation for poetry.
LITERARY FICTION: 0/10. I would have thought I’d read at least one book in this category. I think the problem is there’s several that have been on my “I should read that someday” list far too long.
ROMANTIC FICTION: 1/10. I finally read something on the list and it’s in Romantic Fiction???? Equally surprising to me is that the book is I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I guess thinking I was reading a novel about Roman history, not a romance novel, shows the depth of my lit crit illiteracy.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS: 2/10. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings saved me here. Again, I wonder about the categorization since Tolkien’s work isn’t one that would come to mind if I were asked to identify a classic children’s book.
SCI-FI: 6/10. Not surprisingly, this is my strongest category. Guess I’m just a genre fiction kind of reader, having read Frankenstein, Brave New World, 1984, the Foundation trilogy, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Neuromancer.
CRIME: 2/10. Okay, so not all genre fiction is my cup of tea. I may be doubling my actual count here since one of the works is The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I’m taking credit for having read several of the Holmes mysteries but doubt I’ve read the complete works.
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: 2/10. I may be underestimating here since there’s a couple I might have read in a poli sci class or two. To be safe, I’m only counting Democracy in America and The Prince.
BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD: 3/10. “Your world” must be the key here as most of the books are relatively contemporary. My reads out of this section: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss.
HISTORY: 1/10. I’d find this a bit more surprising if it weren’t for a seeming focus on ancient and European history. That may seem contradictory when the only one on the list I’ve read is Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
LIVES: 0/10. Striking out in the biography/autobiography/memoirs section I will simply attribute to a somewhat of a British emphasis.
So, perhaps I’m not well versed in this particular perfect library. For my tastes, my home library is perfect as far as I’m concerned.
It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library.
Carolyn Wells, The Rest of My Life
As I continue to catch up (and recover) from the Frozen Four journey, a few items of linkage before substantive posting resumes.
- The 2008 Reading the World website is open for business. This year, it features 25 works in translation from 15 different presses. I picked up one of the books while in Denver. (Via.)
- The Telegraph weighs in with “the perfect library.” (Via.)
- I’ll limit my comments on the results of the Harris Poll of America’s favorite books to: Interesting, they’re all fiction.
- From a NYT blog, no less: newspapers argue for First Amendment right to snoop on readers.
- Worst president ever. Why would anyone be surprised?
- So what do you do on the heels of getting a special citation from the Pulitzer Prizes? Write a 40-page picture book for children aged three and up.
- Accepting this application could be a good step toward not being a “silly mayor” but, like the applicant, I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.
- Finally, although taking it a step further than me, Bookdwarf expressed my recent thoughts quite succinctly: “I’ve read a couple of good books lately and I wish I had more time to tell you all about them.” Hopefully, the review mojo will start flowing in the near future.
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone
Title Track, Joni Mitchell, Hejira
Travel to and from the Frozen Four can be awfully exhausting. I’m just now starting to get back in the swing of things. But then it isn’t just watching three great hockey games, there’s the atmosphere and simply being a tourista. Some final, albeit somewhat random, thoughts:
- Add to the hockey games trips to at least five different bookstores. That includes two absolutely wonderful independents, the Tattered Cover and the Boulder Book Store, with a variety that puts the local chains to shame. Had I not been traveling carry on only, I would have come back with far more than the five books that found there way into my bag.
- Favorite t-shirt seen: One that said Boulder, Colo., and “Free Range Humans.”
- Perhaps only in Boulder but certainly never in South Dakota: Left Hand Books.
- Most potentially expensive phrase heard: While walking in downtown Boulder, my oldest daughter saying, “Maybe I’ll come here for my Ph.D.”
- Who are the real hockey fans (plural)?: North Dakota and Michigan were eliminated Thursday. At Saturday night’s championship game, the designated UND fan section (each school gets 600 tickets) was basically full. The Michigan section was close to half empty.
- Who are the real hockey fans (singular)?: Thursday night’s drunk and obnoxious Notre Dame fan evidently wasn’t a big enough fan to show up to watch his team play in (and lose) the championship game against Boston College. Our section was thrilled by his absence.
- Who are the real hockey fans (returnees): The retired couple from Maine I spoke with Sunday morning who said their annual trips to the Frozen Four are “what we do.” Note: Maine not only was not in the tournament this year, the Black Bears got swept in the first round of the Hockey East tournament.
- Speaking of being swept, such was the fate of the Stampede in the USHL playoffs, meaning the Frozen Four was my last live hockey of the 2007-08 season.
- Finally, there is a seemingly identifiable genealogy to my hockey interests. It started in 1999 with the USHL, where the players are competing in the hopes of getting an NCAA Division I scholarship. As USHL players moved on, I started watching college hockey, leading to my first Frozen Four in 2002. I’ve also followed several to the NHL ranks, leading to my Center Ice addiction this season. Interestingly, I saw today that almost a third of the players who played in the NHL this year came from NCAA ranks. That said, if I were to create a “things to do before I die” list, one would be seeing my first live NHL game in Montreal.
If you win a national title, your season never ends.
Boston College hockey coach Jerry York
Cutting through all the preliminaries: Spending about seven consecutive hours in Pepsi Center to watch live championship college hockey — Priceless.
Granted, the seven hours includes getting there 30 or so minutes early to watch warm ups, a 50 minute break between the semifinal games and a total of five intermissions. But even from our vantage point in the third tier, seeing 16 goals as well as an overtime game is great fun, particularly when you don’t really have a dog in the fight. A few random observations and thoughts:
- At least for a few days, Denver is Hockeytown. There’s a ton of fans here from all over the country and they are all invariably fun to visit with. If the variety of jerseys is any indication, a love of hockey is as big a motivator as being a fan of one of the participating teams. I saw a significant number of Nebraska-Omaha and Wisconsin jerseys, as well as the Gophers, Maine, New Hampshire, St. Cloud State, Bemidji and Minnesota-Mankato, to name a few.
- The official NCAA Frozen Four t-shirt for UND was half price even before the Sioux lost to Boston College. Seems that spelling the state as “North Dakoka” reduces the value.
- One of the things I most enjoy other other than simply watching the games is what got me started as a college hockey fan. That’s the number of USHL alumni you get to see play. For example, both UND and Notre Dame have three former Stampede players. Notre Dame’s Stampede alum were on the ice for four of the five goals it scored in its overtime upset of Michigan and two of the players scored or assisted on those four goals). But it’s even fun to watch players you’ve seen play in the past compete at this level, even when they’re alumni of rival USHL teams.
- Another thing I like about the Frozen Four is they don’t sell alcohol at the games. I’m not a teetotaler or anything but I can easily do without people spilling their beer and that percentage of fans who seem intent on spending the evening getting obnoxious.
- The lack of alcohol sales doesn’t mean the place is inebriate free. There were four UND fans standing outside the brew pub kitty corner from our hotel a little after 10 a.m. yesterday disappointed the place wasn’t open. They got on the 16th Street Mall shuttle with us and headed to the Hard Rock, hoping its bar was open. I also know one of the organized UND parties we were invited to started at 1 p.m., three hours before game time, giving people plenty of time to “warm up.”
- I’m not picking on the UND fans. It’s just that there’s so many around and at our hotel that I see more of them than others. In fact, we and the people sitting immediately behind us and to our right unanimously gave the most obnoxious award to the drunk Notre Dame fan three rows behind us. He showed up only for that game and chanted inane cheers at the top of his lungs and had absolutely no clue of what was going on out on the ice. At least if he’d come for the first game, he might have sobered up before the Notre Dame game.
- One of the first stops yesterday was the Tattered Cover Book Store and my daughter and I have hit a total of three bookstores since we’ve been here. It means I’ll be coming home with four more books than I left with, one of the things my wife has come to expect.
- The tourney also provides an interesting question. What theological intricacies are involved when there are two Catholic universities (Boston College and Notre Dame) playing for the national championship and only one can win?
C’mon, this is a football school. Who are we kidding?
Notre Dame hockey captain Mark Van Guilder
|
Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
|
