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"In a recent New York Times interview, marking the release of his charming picture-book Outlaw Pete (public library), Springsteen shares the books that shaped his music and his mind, from poetry to philosophy to children's books - an eclectic reading list spanning numerous genres and sensibilities, life stages and moods. (Favorite childhood book: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; last book that made him laugh: Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land; last book that made him cry: Cormac McCarthy's The Road)."

"I had tried everything from the traditional book report style assessment to more creative movie trailers, but I didn't feel like they accomplished what I wanted from a silent sustained reading assessment. It wasn't until I went to a book club meeting with some friends that inspiration struck. At our book club meetings we ate food, drank wine, and talked about literature for hours. Why couldn't our SSR assessment be more like that? (Sans the wine, of course.) I thought about what inspired me to read my book club books and the answer was that I really enjoyed that evening of food, conversation, and friends. So, I decided to design a book club style chat assessment for our silent sustained reading. The goal was to get my students having conversations about their various books. Ultimately, I hoped they would turn each other on to titles they had read and enjoyed. Below is a brief overview of the assignment. I've also included a link to a Google document with a detailed explanation of the assignment for any teacher interested in using it!"

For those of you who do the movie/book comparison essay: "If I have a relationship with a book and it's poorly done on the big screen, on some level, I'm galled. But on the other hand, not every movie can be "Watchmen," and by now, I should be able to accept the nuance of adaptation, being an adult and all. On the whole, I'd argue that haggling over which is better, the book or the movie, is mostly pointless. The operative word being "mostly." Because there are extreme cases where book-lover rage is justifiable. Which cases? I pulled the Metacritic critic ratings of the top 500 movies on IMDb tagged with the "based on novel" keyword.1 I then2 found the average user rating of the source novel for each film on Goodreads, a book rating and review site.3 In the end, there was complete data for 382 films and source novels."

"McPhee has now published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He's written about Alaska (Coming into the Country), the Swiss Army (La Place de la Concorde Suisse), and an island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides (The Crofter and the Laird). His subjects have included the atomic bomb, the environmental movement, the U.S. Merchant Marine, Russian art, and fishing. Four books on geology. Three on transport. Two on sports. One book entirely about oranges. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism." This is an interview with him about writing and teaching.

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. So what would happen if we ditched this sacred teaching technique? For starters, we could help students read more. Speeding things up might make it easier to grasp--and appreciate--the overall arc of a book, while allowing the opportunity for real connection with the characters and plot. You can't do that at the pace of a chapter a week. Furthermore, aiming for fifteen books a year, rather than five, might expose the students to more good literature . If the goal of an English class is to improve students' grasp of language, introduce them to great literature, and--hopefully--get students excited, then there's really no downside to this approach. If a few students really want to do close reading, they can do it as an elective or jump in head first in college. Otherwise, let's chuck the concept. We gain nothing by teaching kids to hate books--and hate them s-l-o-w-l-y. "

Arthur Levine has spent much of his career writing about how tough it is for poor minority kids to get into college. But rarely has this widely respected educator and former president of Teachers College at Columbia University written more urgently than in his latest book, Unequal Fortunes.It was a journey that took him back to his childhood in the South Bronx to figure out why he made it and why most kids living there now don't. "My hope is that this book shows this community is isolated not by choice but by circumstance, and I hope that it shows that the community is a dangerous one to live in. It's hard to blame them for conditions like that," Levine says.Unlike so many of Levine's books, Unequal Fortunes is not just about failed institutions and policies. It's more of a plea for readers to peer into poor children's harrowing lives and become advocates for what Levine calls a Schindler's List kind of change - maybe not to save all children but to rescue as many as possible.

"We live in a world where communication is evolving faster than the speed of sound. Modern technology has changed the way written communication works on a fundamental level. And yet, many of the grammar rules taught today still cling to antiquated formatting. After consulting with writers from Walrus Publishing, authors J.R. Bowles and Mark Baker, and professional book reviewers from the Book Bloggers Do It Better group, I'm confident in presenting this list of the top eight grammar rules that are no longer requirements for good writing:"

This is the list that Kathy Dittirch sent out. Some interesting pairings here. "The classics tend to dominate English teachers' plans, and throughout grade school, high school and college you're often stuck reading the same ol' tomes off the same ol' lists. So, let's fix that. The writers at HuffPost Culture teamed up to create an alternative back-to-school reading list, in which books like The Giver and Heart of Darkness are replaced with works like On Such A Full Sea and The World and Me."

This site offers thousands of books through the ages on-line. You can take pieces of all fiction and non-fiction and use them in your classes in various ways.

" In this wonderful animated essay, they extol the value of books in expanding our circle of empathy, validating and ennobling our inner life, and fortifying us against the paralyzing fear of failure."

"For 75 years, the Free Library of Philadelphia has held a rare, annotated copy of a First Folio of William Shakespeare, one of just 233 in the world. But nobody knew who had made the notes in the margins, correcting typos and highlighting where Shakespeare deviated from iambic pentameter. Until now, when a Cambridge University fellow and Penn State English professor revealed that the Free Library's First Folio was likely annotated and owned by English poet John Milton. Milton experts and curators of early books all over the world say that this could be one of the most important literary discoveries of our time."

"F Scott Fitzgerald's novel set amid the riotous frivolity of the jazz age defines the American psyche, says author Jay McInerney"

"Whatever you're consuming-even a movie that seems to require no thought-pay attention, and take notes. For Scott, there's no real difference between reading or watching for work and for pleasure. "I can't read without a pencil or pen in hand, whatever I'm reading," he says. "I have to have something to make notes in the margin or underline or scribble with. … I can't just like what I like, or not like what I don't like, without thinking, 'Why?' -Which is kind of where criticism starts.""

"As they progress through middle and high school, students are expected to take on increasing responsibility for their learning, with more out-of-class assignments that require independent research, reading for understanding, and wider application of classroom lessons. Our new book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains: Metacognitive Strategies, Activities, and Lesson Ideas, suggests that learning and applying strategies to "explain it to your brain" can help students improve their study habits. We note some of those strategies here."

"The excerpt below is from the book "Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond," by Larry Ferlazzo. This excerpt is from the chapter entitled "I Still Want to Know: How Can You Get Students More Interested in Reading and Writing?"

"Carrie is a professor at a university. She had asked me how to turn an area of her expertise, secondary school education, into writing that the general public would find rewarding and enjoyable. That's when I began talking about scenes, using her accident as an example of how to approach her work. Almost all creative nonfiction, essays or books, are, fundamentally, collections of small stories - or scenes - that together make one big story."

"The magazine story behind Sebastian Junger's celebrated nonfiction book A Perfect Storm ran in Outside magazine in October 1994. "The Storm" (4,765 words) told the story of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., that sank amid horrific weather, killing everyone aboard. It's a harrowing narrative, and particularly remarkable for being - by virtue of nature and fate - a write-around. Storyboard's questions and comments for Junger are in red; Junger's answers - which he kindly offered by phone - are in blue."

"Through independent reading children gain a wealth of background knowledge about many different things, come to understand story and non-fiction structures, absorb the essentials of English grammar, and continuously expand their vocabularies. "