June 2008


Books and Beyond: New Ways to Reach Readers by Michael F. Optiz, Michael P. Ford with Matthew D. Zbaracki
Review written by Carm, RRVWP Teacher Consultant

Books and Beyond: New Ways to Reach Readers opens with a rationale for using a variety of texts with readers. For the remainder of the book, Optiz, Ford, and Zbaracki explore ten kinds of texts: magazines, poetry, multilevel texts, newspapers, series texts, humorous texts, dramatic texts, real-life texts, anthologies, and cyber texts. I already knew a lot of the content found in this book, but it works for me to use as a rationale for some of the choices I make in my regular English class and in my Title 1 Reading class. I thought it was pretty interesting and well written--fairly easy to whip through. Each chapter was dedicated to a different kind of text and each chapter was formated the same way including such features as "a brief description," "why use them," "how might they be used," "some sample titles" among other topics. At times it felt a bit repetitive but it was also useful in comparing the various genres. However, in the end it was not really all that cutting edge. No section on graphic novels and not too much about online texts. That fact led us to do a study of online texts using, what else, online texts for the following month.

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