Topic 12: Books

Why has Holmes continued to (1) _________________ generation after generation when other fictional detectives of the Victorian period are forgotten? One can break the answers down into a mix of elements. But first it will be useful to summarize the life of Holmes’s (2)____________. Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859, one of nine children of an alcoholic Irish artist who was consigned, in later life, to a lunatic asylum. Young Arthur Doyle was educated at the fee-paying Jesuit college, Stony Hurst. (3)___________ 16 he spent a year in Austria before enrolling at Edinburgh University’s medical school. In 1880 he spent seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler. The following year he graduated with a (4)__________ degree, and made another trip to Africa before setting up, less adventurously, in medical practice near Portsmouth, in July 1882. His income had reached £300 a year by 1885, enabling him to marry the sister of one of his patients. Doyle had long written on the side and in 1886 he played around with stories (5)____________ on an ‘amateur private detec-tive’, called ‘J. Sherrinford Holmes’. The outcome was the Sherlock Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet (1887). No top-drawer publisher would take it and it was eventually serialized as a Christmas giveaway in a magazine and then as what was called a ‘shilling shocker’ – pulp fiction for the masses.

Leisure reading, also known as recreational reading, pleasure reading, free voluntary reading, and independent reading, is independent, self-selected reading of a continuous text for a wide range of personal and social (1)__________. It can take place in and out of school, at any time. Readers (2)__________from a wide range of extended texts, including but not exclusive to narrative fiction, nonfiction, picture books, e-books, magazines, social media, blogs, websites, newspapers, comic books, and graphic novels. Leisure reading is (3)_______intrinsically or socially motivated and a pleasurable activity for the reader.

Students’ home environment, where parents/caregivers encourage reading and model their enjoyment of reading, has a substantial (4)___________impact on children’s performance in reading. In classrooms, leisure reading often takes place during times designated as SSR (sustained silent reading), DEAR (drop everything and read), LTR (love to read), or POWER (providing opportunities with everyday reading), which are the most common terms for classroom leisure reading. It may take place (5) _____individual classrooms or be part of a school-wide activity.

At a time when the younger generation, hooked to the mobiles, TV and internet, is fast-moving away from books, Sundargarh Collector Nikhil Pasan Kalyan has taken it upon himself this particular sacred responsibility. Kalyan on Thursday launched a campaign ‘Sundargarh Bahi Padha’ to promote reading by distributing books among the people in Sundargarh town. He reached out to the people at roadside stalls and engaged with them over cups of tea. While motivating them to read, he gifted books to them.

The district administration plans to extend the initiative to schools and villages in the coming six months with focus on improving school and public libraries, and equipping all offices and waiting rooms with books. Further, reading sessions have been scheduled to be conducted every week at the Collector’s residence campus and other places involving people of all ages including students.

“Books are the best teachers. To improve morality and openness in the society, everyone has to read. They could be in any genre. Reading is the starting point,” said Kalyan.

Chief District Medical and Public Health Officer (CDM-PHO) Dr SK Mishra commented on the present situation: “Youths and students confine themselves to prescribed courses of study and refuse to go beyond that,” he said. Undoubtedly, internet connection and electronic gadgets like computers, laptops and mobile phones provide a sea of information and ready-made knowledge but simultaneously decrease the creativity in individuals, Mishra added.

“Social media kills time, creativity and the urge to pick up a book. It may be noted that people with reading habits have lesser chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s,” he said. Presently, of the four Government-run public libraries in the district three are functional, albeit with few readers. Kalyan has sought collective participation to make the initiative a success.

A new report by the Pew Research Center has provided more documentation on the growing popularity of audiobooks. In a survey of 1,502 American adults conducted from January 8 to February 7 this year, Pew found that 20% of adults listened to an audiobook in the 12 months prior to the period in which the survey was conducted. In 2011, only 11% of them said they listened to an audiobook.

The strongest gains have come since 2016—the dawning of the digital audiobooks age. The percentage of adults listening to audiobooks rose six percentage points between 2016 and the 2019 survey, after rising only three percentage points between 2011 and 2016. According to Pew, since 2018, college students and adults with household incomes over $75,000 are the two groups who have adopted listening to audiobooks the quickest. The Pew survey also found that while listening to audiobooks has risen steadily since the 2016 survey, reading e-books had declined. Twenty-eight percent of adults reported reading an e-book in 2016—double the number who listen to audiobooks that year. By the most recent survey, e-books had only a 5% edge over audiobook usage.

Overall, the Pew survey found a gradual reduction in the percentage of Americans who are reading. In 2011, 79% of those surveyed said they had read a book in the previous 12 months, a number that fell to 72% in early 2019. Print remained by far the book format of choice, with 65% or adults surveyed reporting that had read a print book within the last year, down from 71% in 2011. The percentage of adult who read a book in any format fell from 79% in 2011 to 72% in 2019.

Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical 1963 book “The Bell Jar” is most likely to be found in a sophomore English class, pored over by high-school students. But recently at Squarefoot, a commercial real estate company based in Manhattan, it was the chosen book title for the office book club. “People really latched onto [“The Bell Jar”] and talked about women’s roles in the workplace,” says Eliza Bell, people-operations manager. “The book club has been a bonding opportunity. People are able to learn about each other, and it’s really nice to talk about stuff that isn’t work-related. ‘The Bell Jar’ really brought that out, and we were able to talk about diversity initiatives.” Over the summer, the book pick was “The Hate U Give,” the 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas.

The monthly club meets during a lunch that is provided by the company. In its first iteration, the club met after work and read business books: Not surprisingly, people weren’t quite as enthusiastic about that initiative. The club is the brainchild of CEO Jonathan.

Wasserstrum, who is passionate about reading. There are some rules: At the beginning everyone has a chance to express what they liked or didn’t like. “If someone goes on a rant, it’s important to change the topic and move to another one,” says Bell. “When we read ‘The Last Lecture’ [the 2008 bestseller co-authored by the late Randy Pausch] for instance, it got a little heated.”

What makes for a good pick? “We need an aspect of it to get people excited. It’s important that the books are ones people will have opinions on. People can learn from all sorts of different books,” says Bell. “And they have to be less than 250 pages.”

There is a scam aimed at a child’s desire to be a published writer - usually as a poet, in a book of poems.

How does the scam work?

Keen teachers are unwittingly caught up in the promotion but are completely unaware of the dodgy side of the scheme.

There are plenty of honest opportunities for children’s writing that don’t cost their parents a small fortune and provide a poor-quality product. Most books in scams are badly set out. They tend to be huge volumes, squashing in as many writers’ efforts as possible to make as much money as possible. They’re an embarrassment for the young poets.

These competitions to discover hidden talent sound great in the glossy flyers. Schools too are offered a prize if a winner is from their school. Schools become unpaid ‘agents’ in promotion of the competitions. Parents are happy to pay a small entry fee.

Each child hopes to get an ‘honourable mention’ with the possibility of being selected to be included in a book. The price of the book is not given. Naturally, if a child’s work were published, parents would want a copy of the book. In one such scheme the pre-order price was $67 with an extra $26 if the child’s photo was included. That’s nearly $100! Strangely, awards are given to those who pre-order a book!

The books are not attractive. A copy at a market sold for $2. There were three to five kids’ poems squashed on a page, with over 3000 poems jammed into that one book. Clip Art was used to illustrate the poor publication. Look at the maths. 3000 kids multiplied by $100 equals $300 000. Now add the entry fees of, say, $2 - add another $6000! Enough to cover publicity!

One place winner’ was upset when the parents realised this was a con to buy a book, but not buying the book made the parents feel guilty. Genuine competitions that publish books give a free copy to any ‘winner’.

The Internet is very much like television, in which it takes time away from other pursuits, provides entertainment and information, but in no way can compare with the warm, personal experience of reading a good book. This is not the only reason why the Internet will never replace books, for books provide the in-depth knowledge of a subject that sitting in front of a computer monitor cannot provide. We can download text from an Internet source, but the aesthetic quality of sheets of downloaded text leave much to be desired. A well-designed book enhances the reading experience.

The book is still the most compact and inexpensive means of conveying a dense amount of knowledge in a convenient package. The easy portability of the book is what makes it the most user-friendly format for knowledge ever invented. The idea that one can carry in one’s pocket a play by Shakespeare, a novel by Charles Dickens or Tom Clancy, Plato’s Dialogues, or the Bible in a small paperback edition is mind-boggling. We take such uncommon convenience for granted, not realizing that the book itself has undergone quite an evolution since the production of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 and Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623, just three years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth to colonize the New World.

Not only has the art and craft of printing and book manufacturing been greatly improved over the centuries, but the great variety of subject matter now available in books is astounding, to say the least. In fact, the Internet requires the constant input of authors and their books to provide it with the information that makes it a useful tool for exploration and learning.

Another important reason why the Internet will never replace books is because those who wish to become writers want to see their works permanently published as books - something you can hold, see, feel, skim through, and read at one’s leisure without the need for an electric current apart from a lamp. The writer may use a word processor instead of a typewriter or a pen and pad, but the finished product must eventually end up as a book if it is to have value to the reading public. The writer may use the Internet in the course of researching a subject just as he may use a library for that purpose, but the end product will still be a book.

Books have been around for thousands of years. When ancient civilizations first started developing writing systems, they would write on just about anything, from stone to tree bark. Ancient Egyptians were the first to use paper-like materials, called “papyrus”, which they made by pounding flat the woven stems of the papyrus plant. It was not long before the ancient Egyptians began gluing together papyrus sheets to form scrolls, which were the first steps toward books as you know.

The birthplace of bookbinding is considered to be India in the 2nd century B.C., where Hindi scribes would bind palm leaves that were etched with religious texts between two wooden boards using twine. The technique became popular in the Middle East and Eastern Asia, and spread to the Romans by the 2nd century A.D.

In the mid-15th century, German Johannes Gutenberg invented the first mechanical printing press. His invention was revolutionary because it enabled mass production of books for the first time. Before the printing press, a few pages per day could be produced by hand-copying. Afterward, printing presses could produce as many as 3,600 pages per day.

Today, modern publishers take advantage of incredible advances in technology to produce books in many sizes and shapes very quickly. Although there are many types of processes and machines available, most processes involve similar steps. Printers print the text of a book on large sheets of paper, sometimes as large as a newspaper page. Working with large volumes of paper allows printers to lower costs and produce books more efficiently. The large sheets are then cut into smaller pages that are still about twice the size of a finished book. The smaller pages are then divided into small groups, folded in half, and sewn together.

Lastly, the folded and sewn pages are cut down to their finished size and glued to the spine of the final book’s cover. Depending on the quality of the book, additional finishing touches may be added, such as blank pages at the front and back of the book or special tape around the edges of the cover to increase durability.

Although printed books may never go away completely, today’s readers will most certainly soon become more familiar with e-books. “E-book” refers to an electronic book, which is simply the text of a book displayed electronically, either via the Internet, a CD-ROM, a tablet, an e-book reader, or even a mobile phone. As electronic devices, such as tablets and mobile phones, become more commonplace, e-books are expected to become more and more popular. One of the benefits of e-books is that they save paper, which helps the environment by reducing the demand for trees.

Kids can be creatures of habit. Much like how they can watch the same movie over and over, some kids will stick to one author or genre of book that they’ve fallen in love with. But does it matter if they’re always reading the same type of book? After all, isn’t their love of reading in itself enough? Reading builds their imagination, develops their critical thinking skills, and improves their communication skills, amongst many other benefits.

Well, while a love of reading of any sort is to be nurtured, when a child only reads the same author or type of book, their growth and the benefits they gain may not be as broad if they were to explore more types of books. Coaxing them to open up to reading other genres can be a big advantage for them in the long term.

They will get exposed to different types of characters and lifestyles when they read a wider range of writing. For example, their favourite fantasy novels may spark their imagination, but true tales of life halfway around the world can trigger interest in traveling and foster understanding of other cultures. It helps them develop a broad perspective on the world around them.

Their vocabulary will benefit, too, if they read a wide selection of books. Think of the words and the sentence structure used in a vampire book and how they will differ significantly from those in a suspense novel. They will have to sound out words, and it’ll be helpful to have a dictionary handy. With each new word encountered in the broad range of reading materials they’re consuming, their vocabulary grows.

Reading a variety of books will also help your child grow their love of reading and it’ll fuel their motivation to read more and more. They once only adored one author, who has a limited number of books written, discovering new authors or types of books expands their choice of reading material; they’ll never run out of books to add to their reading list!

Consider, too, the value of specific types of books for very young readers. Ones that teach the alphabet help them learn that letters come together to form the words in books. Poetry with rhyming words will help develop a child’s phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. Folktales and nursery rhymes are beloved and cherished. Surely there are ones that bring you right back to your childhood, and they tend to be shared from one generation to the next - your child’s favourite will likely be ones they teach their children when they grow up and have kids of their own!

Thirty years after ghostwriting Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz described the experience as like putting lipstick on a pig. He felt a “deep sense of remorse” at helping bring the man who would become president gain wider attention. This week, the writer Natalie Beach joined the grand tradition of ghostwriters speaking out about their subjects, with a deeply intimate essay in the Cut laying out how she used to ghost everything for her former friend and controversial “influencer” Caroline Calloway: from Instagram captions to the aborted book that once attracted a $375,000 (£300,000) publishing deal, until their relationship broke down irretrievably.

Beach’s account says that after the pair put the book proposal together, the influencer felt unable to write it. Beach says she “bought us time with the publishers by writing a quarter of the manuscript by myself”.

As a ghostwriter himself, Crofts questions the ethics of speaking out about his subjects’ lives. “I do think Tony Schwartz shouldn’t have come out and said anything about Trump, because you’ve taken the money. It’s like a lawyer: if you find that the person you’re representing is a murderer you can’t then go around bewailing the fact you defended them – that was your job,” he said. “But I think he made Trump, I don’t think Trump would be president if he hadn’t written that book for him, because he’d never have got The Apprentice without the book, and the presidency without The Apprentice. So it must be weighing heavily on his conscience.”

Ghostwriters must be good at several things – being amenable to being steered by a subject, while also being firm enough to guide them away from tangents and uninteresting details. But the most important thing in ghostwriting, says Crofts, is absence of ego. “Which is maybe what went wrong [with Calloway] – Natalie isn’t a born ghost, she’s a writer herself. She was really young and well out of her depth, completely swamped by this girl’s flamboyance,” he says. “Ghostwriters do attract a lot of fantasists and people who have ideas way above the likelihood of success. They always think their story is fantastically interesting and going to be a bestseller. You’re always dealing with people with larger-than-life egos, so there’s always a danger you’re going to run up against someone who is impossible to manage.”