Sponsored by Libby, the one-tap reading app from your library and OverDrive.
According to Jessica Logan, the study’s lead author, kids who are read one short book per day enter kindergarten knowing 290,000 more words than kids whose parents didn’t read to them. If you increase the number of books to five per day, that vocabulary disparity swells to 1.4 million words.
Read to your kids if you’ve got ’em. Offer to read to other people’s kids if you don’t (with their permission, of course).
The Babylonian Almanac is among the earliest texts to lay out such daily prescriptions and predictions. From there, the format took off. By the early modern era, Europeans were eager to know how to carpe the heck out of each diem, and when to evade danger by laying low. In the pages of almanacs, readers found calendars and counsel—everything from reminders about religious feast days to details of the lunar cycle, according to Cambridge historian Lauren Kassell. Readers snapped up these volumes in huge numbers. During the Renaissance, historian Bernard Capp has noted, English almanacs sold some 400,000 copies a year—bested only, perhaps, by the Bible.
Is the modern equivalent the smart phone?
Nothing says that spring is officially here more than a stack of brand new romance novels, am I right? Whether you’re spring flinging or flying solo this season, it’s almost impossible not to get swept up in all of the feels that the longer days, sunshine, and warmer weather seem to invoke. All of the 21 novels below have already been published or will come out before the end of May, so they’re perfect to pack into your suitcase for that spring break trip, or just to tote along on Saturday afternoons spent in the park. The best part? The new crop of diverse rom-coms and romances are not going anywhere anytime soon, so you’re pretty much guaranteed love stories that go beyond the stereotypical and delve into new and, well, exciting territory.
I added a pile of books to my to-read.
