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The Children Who Grow Up in 'Book Deserts'

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In many high-poverty urban neighborhoods, it's nearly impossible for a poor child to find something to read in the summer.

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Al is an avid reader. He estimates he reads a different book every two days. He reads so much, people give him new books all the time.

Al had so many books, he and a friend decided to start their own library.

Only Al has no fixed address. He lives on the street, and so his upstart library is also on the street.

Toronto's new library is under a small bridge on Lower Simcoe Street in Toronto.

"Passersby who noticed my interest in literature began to bring me books. As I have many, I decided to create a library," said Al, an armed forces veteran who did not want to divulge too much about his identity or past.

Al lives on the west side of the Simcoe underpass. His library partner is Elwin Murphy, who lives on the east side.

Al's collection is called The Free Underpass Library, and Murphy's is The East Side Simcoe Library. Al's library has about 40 books, and Murphy's has about 20.

Al's library contains 40 books right now, from titles like Fifty Shades of Grey to children's books, books on politics, biographies of historical figures, and some DVDs. Elwin keeps his collection to 20 books, "because if the authorities ask us to leave, we can put everything in a shopping trolley and clear off. "

The two amateur librarians created signs for the library with a cardboard box.

Literature as wealth

Murphy, who is 52, also counts reading as a pastime. On his makeshift bed of a pile of blankets, he reads detective novels and historical books. He's in the middle of Persian Fire, on the clash between the Persian and Greek empires.

Without shelter, Murphy spent much time in public libraries, but said security guards would "harass him" and always asked him to leave. When Al came up with the idea of ​​creating a library, he saw the opportunity to satisfy his passion for literature without being disturbed.

Murphy said the books have made him intellectually wealthy, and allow him to travel around the world, all while remaining in the underpass.

"Some people believe that I do this to make money, but that is not the case," he said.

"We only wish people would take the books home, and in exchange, bring in a new book. We want the books circulating."

Murphy said others with no fixed address borrow their books. "The homeless have no radio, no television or smart phones; only books allow us to escape," he said.

He said the books, while they allow him to take his mind off his life, also connect him to people around him.

Pedestrians used to walk by without acknowledging the men living in the underpass. But now they stop, take photos, ask questions and often leave with a book.

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With no fixed address, two men start Toronto's only underpass library | CBC News

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Al is an avid reader. He estimates he reads a different book every two days. He reads so much, people give him new books all the time. Al had so many books, he and a friend decided to start their own library. Only Al has no fixed address.

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The other day, I got rejected. It wasn't over love, but nevertheless it stung: a middle school declined my offer to speak to their kids about my latest book, The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, because it would exclude boys.

At first I shrugged, said I understood and went on to other things. But the more I thought about it, the more wound up I became.

Yes, the book is called The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure . Yes, it opens with an author's note that starts, "Dear Gutsy Girl." Yes, all the drawings feature girls.

But that doesn't mean boys are excluded. It just means that the book isn't them.

This, it turns out, is basically the same thing. If you're talking about boys, I mean.

We are raising our boys to lack empathy.

I thought of all the books I'd read in middle school. , for starters, a Western that centers on fistfighting and shoot-'em-ups. (I loved the book.) The only female character was a mother, who (of course) falls into chaste love with the hyper-masculine duking-and-gunslinging Shane. There was The Red Badge of Courage, which takes place on the Civil War battlefield. Loved it too, but I don't recall a single female character. These books' storylines - and many more - were as far away from my life as a girl I could imagine. Yet no one excused me from reading them. And for that I have been very glad.

Then I heard a disturbing story, about a writer who had also written a book that featured girls. When she attended a school assembly to speak to the kids, she saw that many of the seats were empty. Boys, it turned out, had been excused from the program.

So girls are expected to read books about boys, and people of color are expected to read books about whites (and boys). No one thinks twice about whether we should attend the assembly. But boys are immediately excused.

Curious, I looked at that week's . At first the books seemed to vary wildly. There were robots, cats on surfboards, Norse swords, and pet foxes. But of the top ten, nine featured Caucasian boys. The remaining one starred both a boy (of color) and a girl (white); it was the book adaptation of the movie New York Times children's bestseller list Star Wars: The Force Awakens. For this week at least, not a single bestseller had a sole female protagonist. Not a one.

Yet the United States is a country where there are more females than males, and which has a public school system in which people of color outnumber white students. What's up with such a misrepresentative bestseller list? The conclusion I draw is that authors and publishers are throwing their weight behind certain books because of this widespread belief that, hey, everyone will read about boys. So what does this mean for the fate of books? More important: what does this mean for the fate of boys?

We read to experience a panoply of perspectives. We read to learn of people and situations outside and beyond ourselves, so we can deepen our connection and understanding. We read to prepare for life. It follows, then, that we are raising our boys to dismiss other people's experiences, and to see their needs and concerns as the center of things. We are raising our boys to lack empathy.

This insistence by adults that boys want only boy things ultimately damages girls. But it hurts boys too.

The writer whose presentation was not attended by boys is named Shannon Hale, and in her blog post about the incident she goes even further. She says that the agreement that boys shouldn't read about girls, that in fact it's shameful to be interested in what girls do and think about in books, is an agreement that "leads directly to rape culture."

This is serious stuff.

, a nonprofit that challenges destructive cultural stereotypes, comes to similar sinister conclusions. Its movie, The Representation Project The Mask You Live In, looks at how media, among other forces, convinces boys that anything considered remotely girl-like in oneself is not only to be avoided, it's to be reviled. The movie asks, how can a boy steeped in contempt for the feminine grow up to respect women? Answer: he can't and won't.

I asked Representation Project staffer Cristina Escobar what happens when boys read only books by males, about males. She said that they will be "taught that girls are objects, that they are prizes that they can win," and that "boys go out and do things and girls sit back and wait to be rescued."

So this insistence by adults that boys want only boy things ultimately damages girls. But it hurts boys too. Escobar believes that boys want to read about girls, and the persistent statements otherwise are "a stereotype that adults put on kids." She points to an extensive study that showed that almost 80% of boys who play video games don't care about the gender of their avatar. "We all need to explore different parts of our identity and what is unique about us," she told me. "Unfortunately, media often uses stereotypes to communicate. It puts people in boxes and makes it hard for them to live up to their potential." She says that this pressure on boys to "stick to a model that doesn't fit" leads to high rates of binge drinking, depression, school truancy, and even suicide as they become teens.

When a boy is directed to books that reflect only a narrow aspect of the world - often a part he already knows - or he is shamed for any interest in what is considered a "girl book," his understanding of girls and of himself is devastatingly incomplete. So the school that rejected me is doing boys no favors. Ironically, The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure is a "girl book" that boys might love. There are no girls tied to the tracks. There are no love interests. There is only mishap, mayhem and close calls on high mountains, raging rivers and ocean expeditions. Daring, skilled women like "Queen Bess" Coleman (barnstormer and parachutist), Mae Jemison (astronaut) and Ashima Shiraisi (one of the best climbers in the world, man or woman, hands down) are highlighted. The only person who needs to be rescued is the narrator (me), and I always manage to rescue myself. Yes, The Gutsy Girl was written to inspire values of bravery and resilience in girls. But it is also a manifesto against the lame stereotypes boys and men hold of us. It's time that boys see that, as Escobar says, "women are as much doers as the men." It's time that boys read girl books, for everyone's sake.

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The other day, I got rejected. It wasn't over love, but nevertheless it stung: a middle school declined my offer to speak to their kids about my latest book, The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, because it would exclude boys.

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Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction - pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.

Kidd and Castano, who have published their paper in Science, make a similar distinction between "writerly" writing and "readerly" writing to that made by Roland Barthes in his book on literary theory, The Pleasure of the Text. Mindful of the difficulties of determining what is literary fiction and what is not, certain of the literary extracts were chosen from the PEN/O Henry prize 2012 winners' anthology and the US National book awards finalists.

"Some writing is what you call 'writerly', you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is 'readerly', and you're entertained. We tend to see 'readerly' more in genre fiction like adventure, romance and thrillers, where the author dictates your experience as a reader. Literary [writerly] fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way," Kidd said.

Transferring the experience of reading fiction into real-world situations was a natural leap, Kidd argued, because "the same psychological processes are used to navigate fiction and real relationships. Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience, it is a social experience."

Not all psychologists agreed with Kidd and Castano's use of Theory of Mind techniques. Philip Davies, a professor of psychological sciences at Liverpool University, whose work with the Reader Organisation connects prisoners with literature, said they were "a bit odd".

"Testing people's ability to read faces is a bit odd. The thing about novels is that they give you a view of an inner world that's not on show. Often what you learn from novels is to be a bit baffled ... a novel tells you not to judge," Davies said.

"In Great Expectations, Pip is embarrassed by Joe, because he's crude and Pip is on the way up. Reading it, you ask yourself, what is it like to be Pip and what's it like to be Joe? Would I behave better than Pip in his situation? It's the spaces which emerge between the two characters where empathy occurs."

The five experiments used a combination of four different Theory of Mind tests: reading the mind in the eyes (RMET), the diagnostic analysis of non-verbal accuracy test (DANV), the positive affect negative affect scale (PANAS) and the Yoni test.

However, although Castano and Kidd proved that literary fiction improves social empathy, at least by some measures, they were not prepared to nail their colours to the mast when it came to using the results to determine whether a piece of writing is worthy of being called literary.

"These are aesthetic and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can't and don't want to make judgments about," said Kidd. "Neither do we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it's just that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the short-term. There are likely benefits of reading popular fiction - certainly entertainment. We just did not measure them."
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Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds

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Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction - pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.

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Reading books is tied to a longer life, according to a new report.

Researchers used data on 3,635 people over 50 participating in a larger health study who had answered questions about reading.

The scientists divided the sample into three groups: those who read no books, those who read books up to three and a half hours a week, and those who read books more than three and a half hours.

The study, in Social Science & Medicine, found that book readers tended to be female, college-educated and in higher income groups. So researchers controlled for those factors as well as age, race, self-reported health, depression, employment and marital status.

Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all.

They found a similar association among those who read newspapers and periodicals, but it was weaker.

"People who report as little as a half-hour a day of book reading had a significant survival advantage over those who did not read," said the senior author, Becca R. Levy, a professor of epidemiology at Yale. "And the survival advantage remained after adjusting for wealth, education, cognitive ability and many other variables."

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Reading books is tied to a longer life, according to a new report. Researchers used data on 3,635 people over 50 participating in a larger health study who had answered questions about reading.