The world of biography books in grade school

When I was just a yun'in I read a lot. It is a habit I picked up from my parents when I was very young. One of my really good memories of my parents (aside from Kelbo's) was actually sitting in the front room of our house (probably one in Torrance with stairs) and all three of us, both of my parents and me, reading books.

Maybe it is a false memory, but it stayed with me forever.

Anyway, the story below is about how few people read now—that includes adults, teenagers, and children. It does offer the reason why TikTok, Instagram Stories, and YouTube are replacing reading. It says that often, this small clip has a story arc or surprise that scratches our itch for engagement but is much simpler to digest—albeit less fulfilling for many readers.

Here is the snippet from The Guardian about this.

The impact of reading for pleasure on progress in vocabulary, spelling and even maths at age 16 is four times more powerful than the impact of parental education or socioeconomic status, according to an analysis by the charity BookTrust, while five-year-olds growing up in poverty are less likely to be poor themselves as adults if they are read to. Other studies show child readers are more secure, and have better self-esteem and mental health. Targeted interventions aimed at getting children to read and their parents to read to them are one of the single most powerful levers that a new government worried about social mobility, educational outcomes and child mental health could ever pull, as the National Literacy Trust’s current Early Words Matter campaign makes clear.

I had to search to find it, but I remember these books from my elementary school (Chapman Avenue in Gardena). They were biographies, and each was 200 pages long. I still remember some things from these books, like how Walter Reed found that mosquitoes were responsible for Yellow Fever. And how that decision allowed doctors in Panama to hold off malaria and yellow fever in American workers to finish the canal.

They named the hospital Walter Reed after him.

I read many of them, which sometimes pops up in my brain when questions arise, even though I don't consciously remember them all.

They are now seen as problematic by both Conservatives and Liberals (love in the time of book banning), and perhaps they are. But from 3rd to 6th grade, I loved every one of them. I must have read about 25 of them.