"People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading." - Logan Pearsall Smith

Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that —Harry Potter fans aside — so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader.
Patrick Welsh discusses how schools are “destroying the joy of reading". And yet when I left the house my four-year-old - who hasn’t been hit by the school trauma yet - was curled up in the big armchair happily plowing through several Little Bear books, a Frog and Toad, and an Amelia Bedelia we hadn’t yet seen. And he was negotiating with the babysitter for how many chapters of the Moomintroll book she would read. (I told her that with temps nearing a hundred, she should just hole up in the one room with an air conditioner and read to them for the next hour or so, if she could stand it.) I hope his love of books and reading stays with him in the oncoming years.

This morning I took the boys to story time at our local library. It’s something I have been meaning to do for ages, but today I finally got my act together. (Sarah L., one of these days we are trekking to your library for *your* story hour!) The librarian read three stories (one of which, King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub, we have at home), sang some songs, and did a craft project involving crowns made out of that foamy stuff with more foamy stickers stuck on. The boys enjoyed themselves, even if Si got a bit shy during the singing, and I sat on the floor in the story area and read *my* book for half an hour, monitoring them out of the corner of my eye. All in air-conditioned bliss. Then they picked out lots of books, and Si got to pretend to be the librarian and check them out with the scanner and the computer. (For those curious, they picked out several Frog & Toads, several Little Bears, Amelia Bedelia, Come Back!, Jamberry, a Richard Scarry of nursery rhymes, Blueberries for Sal, and a book about counting and the alphabet. Oh and two Dr Seuss’ - I Am Not Going to Get Up Today, and Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?) I also got the first in the Moomintroll series and Si and I are looking forward to starting it tomorrow. The librarian (not my favorite one) said he’d read it due to a Finnish friend’s recommendation and thought they were charming and amusing books. So that’s cool, it should be fun.

******************************************************

I picked up Voices From Chernobyl which I requested a while ago (probably thanks to the Guardian, but maybe Bookslut). Incredible, heartrending stuff. I didn’t want to put it down but someone had to read Little Bear (or as Jude says, Yittle Air) to the boys. I can’t wait to get back to it. I am two chapters into it and I have already cried. I spent much of the time reading just those two chapters with my hand over my mouth and an ache in my heart.

And I love a book that prompts me to do research. My maternal grandparents were from the Ukraine - my grandmother from just outside Kiev, but no more specific idea about my grandfather as he ran away to join the Austrian army and to escape an abusive father at the age of sixteen. (My paternal grandparents were Lithuanian, so that part of the world holds special interest for me.)

The Chernobyl power plant is about 7 km [4 miles] from the border with Belarus, while about 100 km [62 miles] to the south lies Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, with a population of 3.1 million. The reactor complex, which has been inactive since 12 December 2000, stands by the river Pripyat, which joins the Dnieper at the town of Chernobyl, 12 km [7.5 miles] away…

In the night of 25 to 26 April 1986, the explosion of the reactor in Chernobyl, the greatest industrial disaster in the history of humankind, released one hundred times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki…

At the time of the accident, about 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 3 million children. About 350 400 people were resettled or left these areas. However, about 5.5 million people, including more than a million children, continue to live in the contaminated zones. (from http://www.chernobyl.info/)

Svetlana Alexievich has compiled and edited her interviews with survivors, doctors, and other affected residents, and fashioned them into a complex and heartbreaking look at the reactor accident and its aftermath. Chernobyl is NOT remote, as you can tell from the distances above - it is somewhat comparable to a nuclear reactor explosion within fifty miles of downtown Los Angeles. The pictures on this Chernobyl website are upsetting and simply incredible in their desolation and sadness. Entire towns have been wiped out and forgotten. This website also has some incredible pictures. (There are some questions as to its authenticity but it seemed ok to me, judging from all the other pics I looked at, and the narrative on this site is very interesting.) It’s just amazing to me that this could happen in the modern-day world.

I had a friend at a place I used to work who was from Kiev. Both of her parents still live there; they are both doctors. Natalia was about 12 when the accident happened. Her parents sent her and her siblings away for two years, to keep them safe, but the parents stayed in Kiev to help as much as they could. She said her parents claim that even today they still see an unusual number of cancers (especially leukemia), birth defects, and other side effects of radiation poisoning.

The exploded/melted reactor has been encased in a concrete sarcophagus that was built to contain the still-unstable melted core for twenty years. Construction on a new enclosure which should last for a hundred years is due to begin in 2008. (I know, I KNOW…it’s insane.)

"...the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power." - Hans Bethe, Nobel Prize-winning physicist