The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

I read The Read-Aloud Family a month ago and in it, she raves about this book as being the book that got her started in her adventure of always reading books aloud with her children. I'd already heard of this book years ago but never gotten around to it, but that book motivated me enough that I wanted to read this one too. Unfortunately, this book is not as good as The Read-Aloud Family, or at least, it has a different point and it wasn't as useful to me. This book seems to be written to convince people--possibly people in positions of power, like superintendents of a school district or at least teachers in a classroom--that reading to children is a silver bullet to help improve all sorts of test scores and every possible learning achievement you could want for your kids and your schools. This book is very heavily research-based and there were even chapters debating how harmful digital books and digital learning can be, and how television is detrimental to kids. I definitely agree with these things, but it didn't seem to fit in with what I expected to get out of this book and it wasn't useful to me, since I am already convinced that TV isn't good and we hardly watch any at all in our house. I thought some of it was very good, and I definitely enjoyed the book list at the end of the book with books to read, and I will be checking those out for sure. I am glad to have a copy to refer back to at different times (again, especially for the book list!), but I will definitely be skipping about half of the chapters and not needing to read those again.