This sounds like an interesting book about reading, speculating that the act itself is one of improvisation and that it changes the brain in positive ways.

Quoted: Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.

For fans of the TV show "Firefly," this is supposed to be a pretty great piece of fanfic.

A very cute reading light. I may pick this up for my bedroom.

Quoted: This Black and Blum bedside reading light has recently won awards. It features polished zinc-plated arms and legs and 40 watt silver crown reflector bulbs (supplied) which make up the bodies.

The Poynter Online folks have been doing some really fascinating work in tracking eye movements of news readers online vs. tabloids and broadsheets. If you follow the link, you should check out the video and the PDFs, both are useful.

Some of the key findings are:

- People actually read more complete articles online, meaning they read them all the way through.

- There are two types of readers: methodical and scanner.

- Alternative story forms seem to work better than consistent formatting. Adding visual display of information, FAQs, sidebars, helps retention.

- Online, people look at nav bars and teasers much more than in print. Print, big photos and headlines are the way to go.

- Action photos draw attention. Small mugshots do not.

An interesting piece asking whether or not it's actually worth it to read all the way through books and stating that it's quite common at the college level "not to."

I do agree with the one point he makes about it sometimes being easier to draw conclusions from reading less of the book. I read everything I could get my hands on for a holocaust literature course, the required and the optional readins, incclduing some not even on the cirriculum. On the final test, I was a mess of competing theories and ideas scoring worse than in any of my other literature course finals. I still passed but my scores were not an indication of my involvement.

The University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard's best seller "How to Talk About Books That You Haven't Read" is flying off the shelves in France. Not only does Bayard tell readers how to fake literary orgasm, but he admits to giving lectures on books he hasn't bothered to read. I'm sure Bayard's book will be met with outrage from many academics on this side of the Atlantic who lack the French national penchant for public display and intellectual pretension. Obviously, there is something seriously reprehensible about Bayard's know-nothing chutzpah (or whatever the French word for that is). Our goal as teachers is to teach what we know, not what we don't. But, outrage aside, perhaps it's time to admit that not reading has its virtues as well as its vices.

This is an interesting blog I discovered through bookninja. Called "Seen Reading," the author writes about what she sees other people reading. Awesome.

These are some pretty sad reading stats. 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.