Reading A Book

CLEVELAND - For $100 you can get the Beverly Hillbillies Bible Study Kit, which includes four episodes and 10 study guides that help you find connections among the words of Jethro, Jed and Granny and the word of God. Also available are Bible study books and lesson plans for The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy and The Brady Bunch. In fact, thousands of churches are using sitcoms to teach spirituality. Next month, a serious book by a religious writer for the Orlando Sentinel is due out called The Gospel According to the Simpsons.

An interview with Nancy Berla, co-founder of the Vantage House book club. What is Vantage House? Vantage House is a life-care retirement center [in Columbia]. How did your club get started? I founded it with some of the residents. It was interesting because they had asked the [Howard County] library for support in setting up a book club, and I volunteer at the library in another capacity, and my mother-in-law had recently moved into the Vantage House. We started the book club in April of 1982.

Editor's note: One town is never the same after one young woman sets out to make reading its No. 1 priority Bet you never heard about Library Lil. Lil wasn't always a librarian, of course. She was a kid first, just like most people. And like most kids, Lil had a wild imagination. She loved to read, and she imagined herself the hero of every book she checked out of the library. By the time she was eight, she'd read all the books in the children's room. Yes, Lil was a fast reader. And she had the most powerful, strong arms, too. Her strength might have come from carrying all those books around, for when Lil ran out of children's books, she started in on encyclopedias.

"Love Among the Ruins," by Robert Clark. W.W. Norton. 333 pages. $24.95. Lately, I'll be reading a book, come across a bogus line of dialogue, an improbable turn of plot unpersuasively written, an interior monologue that stinks of unprocessed journal entry, and I'll have to stop reading the book. I'll try to get back into the narrative, but no matter what psychological game I play with myself, I just can't do it. It's as if the book has broken in my hands. The spell is weak. The book doesn't work.

Tonight, tens of millions are expected to watch the final episode of the second installment of "Survivor." Tomorrow, tens of millions will gab about the ending, second-guessing how it all came down to Colby and Keith and Tina, and how they knew all along that Colby (or Keith or Tina) would be the final winner. The rest of us - those we'll call the Conavida Tribe (roughly translated as "Tribe With-a-Life") - have two choices. We can draw ourselves up haughtily and sneer, "Oh, I don't own a television machine."

Stephen G. Bloom, a San Francisco-based journalist who had seen it all and had enough, chucked it in the early '90s and moved his family to Iowa, home of the Hawkeyes and lots of corn, but precious little of his beloved Jewish culture. "You can get bagels in Iowa," says the University of Iowa journalism professor. "But they taste more like unsweetened doughnuts." He was feeling very much like a stranger in a strange land when he stumbled upon a magazine article about a sect of Hasidic Jews called the Lubavitchers, who in 1987 moved from the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn to a tiny Iowa town called Postville to start a kosher slaughterhouse.

Reading aloud is the magic key that opens up the world of books for your child. One of the most widely recognized experts in the read-aloud movement is Jim Trelease, author of "The New Read-Aloud Handbook." Along with many other educators in the field of reading, Trelease recognizes that successful readers are those who have early and ongoing experiences with literature at home. Here are some of the ways to share reading with your child based upon current research: * Begin reading to your child as early as possible.

READING IS fundamental to education, and pupils at Carrolltowne Elementary School are striving to make reading a daily habit.The PTA's Literacy Committee kicked off its newest reading program Thursday afternoon with a school assembly and guests.Many pupils and faculty were dressed in black and orange as they welcomed former Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dave Johnson and the Oriole Bird mascot.Literacy committee Chairwoman JoAnna King and members Tricia Boyd, Kathy Groose, Jackie Hill, Jeanne McHale, Rochelle Schneiderman and Audrey Sutherland encouraged the pupils' excitement as they chanted, cheered and led in singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

WASHINGTON -- Under normal circumstances, any U.S. senator might have felt upstaged by a pair of bears and a monkey.But when Curious George and the Berenstain Bears interrupted Sen. Slade Gorton Thursday morning on the East Lawn of the Capitol, the Republican from Washington graciously yielded the spotlight.Gorton was there to help launch Book Bank, a national book donation program, and who better to get about 40 children excited about receiving free books than the book characters themselves?

ONE DAY LAST WEEK I read Voltaire's "Candide" for the first time since college.I read it at home, in my study, on a computer screen, straining through the bottom of my bifocals, getting a stiff neck, just as I do when reading a book.I'd stumbled on "Candide" while browsing some literary Web sites. I might as well have happened on the book while browsing at the public library.Though I had read lots of text, even some literary text, over many years of working and e-mailing on the computer, "Candide" was the first book I'd read online, "cover to cover."