I Read

''I read 'Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods that Make My Day' by Jamie Lee Curtis. This book is fantastic. It has great pictures that make the story really funny. Also, I thought this book was a fantastic book to read because the main character's feelings are like my feelings on some given days. This book is good for a bad day or sad day at home or at school.''- Kayla Penn-JonesChurch Lane Elementary``I've been reading a series called 'Animorphs' by K.A. Applegate. The 'Animorphs' books are about five teen-agers who are given the power to morph into animals to save Earth from alien slugs called Yeerks.

The student: Hajin Kim,16 School: Howard High Special achievement: Hajin earned a 1600 on her SAT, the highest possible score. A candidate for the National Honor Society, Hajin is a member of her school's math team and captain of the tennis team. She plays violin with the school orchestra and has a black belt in tae kwon do. What factors led to her SAT accomplishment? "I have had very, very good teachers in math," Hajin said. "They laid such a good foundation that helped me a lot. And the English - I read so many books when I was a kid. I was such a bookworm.

Old Friends by Stephen Dixon. Melville House. 220 pages. $22.95. Prolific and daring, curmudgeonly and coy, Stephen Dixon breaks almost every revered writing rule -- over and over, because he can. Everybody knows, for example, that a single paragraph extended across several pages will feel, to many readers, like an insurmountable wall, an unnecessary challenge; Dixon, it seems, has a penchant for such walls. Everybody knows, likewise, that something is supposed to happen in a novel -- that the minutiae and sometimes vulgarity of domestic life are not the stuff of entertainment; ask Dixon if he cares.

Kevin Hollander likes to read. A lot.When his elementary school signed up for the governor's second annual Reading Across Maryland competition, the first-grader decided he was going to do everything he could to help his school.By the time the competition ended last week at Reisterstown Elementary School, the 7-year-old had done just that, reading 1,062 books over six months -- an average of more than five books a day."I like to read scary books the most," Kevin says. "Sometimes I read with my mom or my dad, but I like reading by myself the most.

There are books that deserve to be punished. Others deserve to be ignored. Many are worthy, but aren't your cup of won ton. I can think of nothing fit for discussion in a family newspaper that is more privately personal than the question of what you read.I love books. I love the idea of them. In principle, I am fond of the people who write them. I admire the energy, the mission that sets people to scribbling, and the discipline that keeps them going. I believe little of enduring and purposeful importance in the world has not been expressed originally in a book.

Havre de Grace. -- This may be exurbia, I sometimes have to remind visitors from more metropolitan settings, but it isn't Burundi, for crying out loud. I mean, there are two or three different places in town where you can buy the Washington Post, and people do.A community with the Washington Post available every morning, stacked on the shelf at Charles McLhinney's news stand along with the Cecil Whig and the Racing Form, is a pretty up-do-date place, I'd say. We're cruising right down the big information highway with everyone else, and what all the big shots in Washington know, we know too. It may not be worth 70 cents, which is what the Post costs here, but by gosh we know it.There was a time in the distant past when I read the Post as closely as anyone.

One word of the challenges of writing well about food is getting beyond the ingredients and onto the passion. Of moving your readers beyond the 2 teaspoons of salt and onto the salt of the earth.Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, who died Monday at the age of 83 in northern California, did that. I never met her, I read her.I read her as an escape. When I should have been worrying about cholesterol, I would read her describe the seductive powers of "souffles that sighed voluptuously at the first prick."

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is when I was born, and what my childhood reading habits were like, and why it took me so long before I finally read ''The Catcher In The Rye,'' a book that most kids read in junior high or high school.Well, back then, back when I was 13, 14, 15, 16 and all, I just hated to read, if you want to know the truth. Oh, I read comic books and Time-Life picture books, magazines, the paper and stuff like that. But nothing too serious, nothing the teachers called serious literature, at least on my own.I remember in sixth grade this girl Nancy who used to read a book a week and the big deal that Mrs. Wise, our red-haired teacher, made out of it. She really did. And I also remember Michael Poston who was in the same class, and the time he looked down his nose at me behind those thick, nerdy glasses of his, acting like he was superior and smarter because he had read ''Exodus'' and I hadn't.

Katie Mazanek, 3, trailed after her mother at the new Barnes & Noble superstore in Schaumburg, Ill., clutching a children's book and sounding like a talking doll whose string was being pulled at specific intervals."

When I begin hearing the whistle of the school crossing guard just down the street, September has truly arrived. My life is thankfully no longer regulated by school day requirements -- although I suffer recurring dreams that I may be required to take the SAT again. Precisely 40 years ago this month, I was in academic high anxiety. Toward the end of the summer of 1966 (why do anything important early?