October is National Reading Group month, and it’s also the one-year anniversary of the release of Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs. As you may know, I love helping new mother-daughter book clubs get started, and to celebrate my book’s birthday, I’m giving away one copy of Book by Book [...]

A couple of days ago I talked about an article David Brooks wrote about kids being given books to read during the summer and how it helped their overall performance in school. I’ve also run across another article written by Laura Miller for Salon.com linking books and literacy. Here’s an excerpt: “A study recently published [...]

A recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times cites a study where researchers sent books home with disadvantaged students for summer reading.  After doing this for three years, they found that these students had significantly higher reading scores than other students. Brooks goes on to talk about other indicators supporting the tremendous [...]

I remember when my first mother-daughter book club read a book that dealt with teen sex. The moms were pretty freaked out, thinking our 13-year-old daughters were too young to read about kids just a few years older than them having sex. But we soon realized our daughters really wanted to know what their moms [...]

Today is Drop Everything and Read (D.E.A.R.) day, a wonderful time dedicated to the joy of reading. When my daughters were young, they had D.E.A.R. time every day in elementary school. In middle school this time was known as SSR or Silent Sustained Reading. Not nearly as fun as D.E.A.R. right? D.E.A.R. makes me think [...]

This past weekend I had the chance to travel with two other book-club moms down to the University of Oregon where we met our three daughters. Since our book-club girls graduated from high school last spring, we’ve been searching for ways to keep the group active and involved, and parents’ weekend at school was a [...]