Reading

California charter schools outperform traditional public schools in reading but significantly lag in math, according to a national study released Monday by researchers at Stanford University.

I'm ambivalent about Banned Books Week, which runs through Saturday. On the one hand, we clearly still need such a public affirmation, as the recent tumult over Sarah Palin and her "rhetorical" inquiries to the Wasilla, Alaska, public library show. On the other, Banned Books Week offers up the sort of toothless, feel-good spectacle that makes us less likely to consider the actual ramifications of free expression.

Lori Richardson perused the book shelves, picking up one book for consideration and then another. At first glance, there was little that appeared to tie the widely varying authors and genres together. But a closer inspection revealed shelf tags and signs promoting local book club selections. Richardson, a book club member herself, was looking over some of the selections of the more than 60 reading groups registered at Village Books, a 27-year-old landmark in this northern Washington town.

A buzzed-about U.S. Department of Education study released this month found that some popular software programs schools use to teach math and reading are pretty worthless. I'm a chump for any pedagogic tool that beeps or lets me click on animated bunnies, so I was ready to write skeptically about the study.

Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck could become regulars in elementary and middle school classrooms: Maryland's top educator on Thursday encouraged teachers to use comic books to inspire students to read. The state worked with Disney Publishing Worldwide and its educational division last year on a pilot project in eight third-grade classrooms. Disney took Maryland's reading standards and created comics-based lesson plans, incorporating skills such as how to understand plot and character.

The wide lawn on the south side of Los Angeles City Hall is normally empty on weekends, but on Saturday it resembled the children's section of a giant open-air bookstore. An estimated 30,000 children and their parents converged on the lawn for Feria del Libro: A Family Book Fair, a daylong festival to promote reading among children and their families. Many of the children needed no encouragement. For them, it was all about finding new stories.

FOR far too long, Los Angeles -- the largest book-buying market in the country -- was stuck with an undeserved reputation as a cultural wasteland where nobody reads. It was a ludicrous put-down, given L.A.'s well-documented literary pedigree as home to a multitude of talents both native (Ray Bradbury, Charles Bukowski) and imported (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner). But the truth can no longer be denied. L.A.'

NEW YORK -- The latest National Endowment for the Arts report draws on a variety of sources, public and private, and essentially reaches one conclusion: Americans are reading less. The study, "To Read or Not Read," is being released today as a follow-up to a 2004 NEA survey, "Reading at Risk," that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year.

Five-year-old Dena Morton, dainty, serious and shy as a fawn, speaks in a whisper to strangers. It is her big brother Dane, 11, who does the talking, while 2-year-old Damon plays peek-a-boo. Dane explains how difficult it is for them to have their father gone. Their father, Craig Morton, is a career Navy engineer who has been stationed in the Persian Gulf for seven months.

THERE'S no sign on the dark glass doors of the Books on Tape recording studio tucked into a plain-wrap business park in Woodland Hills, nothing to indicate that life's certainties -- death and taxes, as well as sex, heartbreak, war, murder and religion -- are regularly talked about within. The state-of-the-art studio, built in 2004, handles the production of 400 audio books a year.