"Teachers must create a love for books that will drive students to reach for them every school year" (Intro, xv).

"Teenagers want to read - if we let them" (Ch. 1, 1).
- Readers need attention, encouragement, and challenge
- Building stamina, balancing pleasure with challenge and increasing volume

"Frustration undermines the will to read" (Ch. 2, 12).
- Managing, sustaining, building an independent reading life in high school and middle school

"The goal is understanding, not speed" (Ch. 3, 27).
- Week, semester, year goals
- Increasing complexity over time
- Easy reading builds confidence, hard reading builds skills

"Controlling what students read stifles readers" (Ch. 4, 52).
"...crafting an individual reading life of challenge, whim, curiosity and hunger is the most important thing for each of my students to achieve" (Ch. 4, 52).
- Helping students choose books based on areas of interest
- Balance independent reading, mentor texts, whole-class or small-group novel study
- Build a classroom library

"I need to help the many students who will struggle to find a book at first" (Ch. 5, 59).
- Book talks - hold the book, know the book, read a short passage, keep records, accept help from others as sources for books, remember your passion is contagious
- To-read-next lists
- Using a book talk to analyze a writer's craft
- Classroom community - collaboration, interdependence, everyone belongs, sharing thinking

"I must take the time to hear, persistently, the struggles and plans of the individual readers in my classroom in order to know them as people and help them develop reading habits that will guide them long after they leave my classroom" (Ch. 6, 78).
- Conferences to help students manage their individual reading lives
- Listen to students and listen well, ask questions - being responsive leads to trust and their openness to be influenced by you
- Conferences to: monitor reading lives, teach reading strategies, increase complexity and challenge
- Keep records of conferences - helps keep track of students and helps us to reflect on what works/what doesn't

"...understanding is critical to reading proficiency, and analysis is an essential skill" (Ch. 7, 97).
"...independent learning is critical...They're waiting for someone else to tell them what they need to learn rather than using the tool of reading and literacy to learn" (Ch. 7, 98).
"...the key is discovery. We cannot be told. We must seek it...Writing is discovery" (Ch. 7, 99).
- Students need to write about the thinking they do while reading
- Ask students questions which they must use evidence from the text to answer
- Have students respond to quotations from the text
- Students should reflect on content and craft of their mentor texts, annotating their reading, paying attention to structure
- Rereading to deepen understanding, storyboarding, sketching, drawing connections between two different texts
- Letting students find their own answers and become independent thinkers

"...we want more than just a collection of individual satellites. We want a solar system, a community of readers working together to understand the entire field of literature better" (Ch. 8, 120).
- Big idea books to make connections about books that share common themes in literature - creating an order for literature helps students see connections
- Quarterly reading reflections with reading-rate calculations, setting goals and making them public
- Steps for students to reflect: determine difficulty of books, determine reading rate, write minireviews of favorite books, set goals (volume and complexity), reflect on reading in a short essay

"We are committed to developing a community of readers" (Ch. 9, 148).
"We can't wait for someone else to teach our students to love books. We are the miracle workers" (Ch. 9, 154).
"Kids who aren't reading are not engaged in learning that lasts...They're reciting what they've been told" (Ch. 9, 156).
"Reading teachers read" (Ch. 9, 158).
- Standardized tests are not a good measure of what students are able to do as readers - reading lists and reflections, and their growth and challenges over the school year, as well as increasing complexity should be assessed instead
- Schoolwide reading breaks are very important to creating a culture and community of readers
- Schools should: provide access to many books, hold students accountable for reading during the reading break time, maintain silence during this time, have clear consistent expectations for teachers during this time, recommend books, and proactively deal with nonreaders
- Schools should assign summer reading to prevent achievement loss, and they should be books that students can and will read independently
- Schools should hold literature circles or book club groups over summer to encourage reading