FOSTERING READING IN THE NEW AGE

CATCH A FIRE

Writers, like actors, hold many jobs in support of their creativity. Writer, De’Lois M. Jacobs is no exception, utilizing her grammar, computer and typing skills in work as a freelance editor, part-time word processor, and sometime executive assistant and legal secretary. It was at a long-term temp assignment at Decurion, the parent company of Pacific Theaters, that she first heard of Wonder of Reading. She signed up to help stuff envelopes after work and soon became a volunteer reading tutor in the program.

Wonder of Reading puts libraries, books and tutors in public schools. After selecting a school near her home in the West Adams district in Los Angeles, to her surprise, she was assigned a plucky second grader who only spoke, read and wrote Spanish. Luckily, De’Lois had taken Spanish lessons in college, and in a matter of months her student was reading and speaking English at benchmark level. “She took to it, like a duck to water,” she proudly says of her young pupil.

A lifelong reader, De’Lois says: “I don’t remember ever not knowing how to read. It seems I’ve always known how.” Now she is sharing that love of learning to read by pledging a percentage of sales from her Amazon Kindle Digital Text Publication (DTP): “The Dress, A Personal Paean In Four Parts” to the Wonder of Reading Program, and is striving to be the first Kindle million seller by asking every Kindle owner to download her work. Considering it only costs less than two dollars, that seems like a highly reachable goal. What, you ask, is Kindle? Only the hottest new electronic pocket-book sized device that allows you to carry an entire library wirelessly. The brainchild of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, it is going to revolutionize reading as we know it.

Well, what are you waiting for? For the love of reading, if you own a Kindle, download “The Dress” now and, if you don’t, could you think of a better reason to get one? Catch a fire, that’s what you use kindling for.