Andy's Reviews > How to Raise a Reader

This is a visually appealing list of children's books. However, it has higher ambitions, bringing up the science of reading but getting things wrong while failing to give references. For example it proposes that just having lots of books lying around is the way to get kids to read. I have nothing against lots of books in the home, but this misrepresents the research. Reading, as opposed to speaking, is not a natural process that children just pick up. It is an artificial decoding practice that needs to be taught. It could be that the target audience takes this instruction for granted, but to decrease illiteracy in the nation, it would have been more useful to explicitly explain about alphabet acquisition and such, and to connect that with the book recommendations. (The authors do not present themselves as scientists so the book gets more than one star.)