Read

THE CHILDREN of Deep Run Elementary School read 6,339 books last month and collected 3,469 items of nonperishable food. In the school's "Read-to-Feed" program, the pupils read the books in exchange for pledges of food for the hungry. At an assembly Thursday, the children celebrated their success. About 800 children sat cross-legged on the floor, filling the cafeteria. Teachers and parents sat on folding chairs along the walls. Inventory specialist Joe Sanders and events coordinator Helene Miller of the Maryland Food Bank honored the school's efforts.

FESS UP: Who didn't at some point in their early years rely on those yellow-jacket-striped booklets to decipher Shakespeare, Dickens or Hemingway? Back then, CliffsNotes were must-reads - perhaps the only reads - for many high schoolers. Even college students relied on Uncle Cliff's band of summarizers and analyzers to decode Aristotle's Ethics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Joyce's Ulysses. But news that CliffsNotes and its competitors are printing up their takes on the Harry Potter series and the book club fare of popular novels sounds like a sorry tale of well-read wannabes.

An interview with Fran Fanshel, a founding member of The Shirley ValentinesBook Club. How did your club come up with its name? It was inspired by the movie, which was about two women who run away from their everyday lives to seek adventure. So the book club name is a metaphor for seeking adventure through reading. Does the name inspire the kinds of books your club chooses? No, it was just a launching point. Part of the reason we were forming the club was to stay in touch with one another because I was changing jobs to work out of town, and most everyone else was working in Columbia.

The other day a reader was so nasty with his complaint, I was tempted to say, ''Sir, if you don't calm down, I may have to cancel your subscription.''He was incensed about ''too much crime'' in The Sun and mentioned a penetrating series by Scott Shane on ''An Epidemic of Murder,'' a two-part probe of youths, drugs and guns in Baltimore. It was clear after a few minutes that the man hadn't read the lengthy pieces that opened clear windows on the depressing tableaux. He was responding to headlines, pictures and the subject.

Advice and strategies to help your children read If you're a mother, kick off your shoes and hand this article over to other family members and relax. Leave it to your loved ones to try out some of the following ideas for a holiday you'll always treasure. * Make an IOU coupon book. Using an index card, on one side write an activity or chore that busy moms would be happy to redeem, such as "Take out the trash for one month" or "Wash the car." Staple the cards together into a book. * Make a pop-up bouquet card.

New York."How's Fiona?'' asked a friend a couple of days after my daughter's sixth birthday.''Great,'' I said. ''She's a happy kid, great company. Funny, a few weeks ago she was cranky a lot. Whatever you said, she'd come back with, 'I already knew that. So there!' ''''I swear it's the even years,'' said my friend Amanda Urban, who has a daughter, Kate, eight years old. ''Forget the terrible twos; that's all wrong. They drive you crazy in the odd years, three or five, but they're angels at two or four or six.''That's part of it, I'm sure.

Martha O'Keefe, a homemaker from McLean, Va., whose multiple sclerosis has taken most of her eyesight, hadn't been able to read a letter, newspaper, magazine or theater program for 10 years.In November, she brought home an Open Book. It's not a book book, but a startling combination of off-the-shelf personal computer technology and innovative software."Now, if I get a typed letter from a friend, I just go upstairs and put it on the machine and just let it read the letter to me," Mrs. O'Keefe said.

Ted Rubinstein, who drives for Valley Cab, thinks he's heard about 1,000 stories, and almost all of them pretty good. In fact, some of them were classics. He's listened to Dickens, Faulk-ner and the Bronte sisters while driving. You name the story, and Rubinstien has probably heard it."I listen to books on tape because I am not a good reader, never been," he says. "It would probably have taken five of my lifetimes to read what I've heard on tape. I started in 1988 with all the books I'd heard of but never read, what you'd call the classics."

I had been of a mind to make an argument again for the grace of reading aloud, a practice that may find its finest hour at Christmastime. I am pleased that the case made by Stephen Proctor would leave my persuasion redundant or worse.Read that piece. And then read the sample of Dickens that we have published above these words. Read it aloud, to somebody, best to an entire family drawn together. Then, if you have the time and the material, read more. There is a lot.My personal fondnesses begin with the first 14 verses of the second chapter of St. Luke in the King James version (God may have reasons for the Reviseds and Standards and Good Newses and all the other versions, but it is a certainty the reasons are not literary)

LONGFELLOW resident Alvin Meckler took the oft-repeated advice to write about what you know when he penned a play about a man facing his own mortality.The result, titled "Gibberish," will get a first reading at 2 p.m. June 28 in Theatre Outback at Howard Community College.It is part of the Rep Stage Works in Progress Play Development Series.Meckler said the play is about the reactions of a husband and wife when the man develops prostate cancer, a condition for which Meckler was successfully treated.