You don't have to read and pronounce every word on a page to share books with a child.

It's really a two-fold approach. First, the program emphasizes story sharing with the children. Then the adult session teaches you to recognize themes, morals of the stories and apply them to our lives as you're talking about the book with your children.

The sessions have a support group format, so everyone who goes through can see they're not alone. Everyone has some literacy skills, whether you're an avid reader or someone who doesn't read. The program helps people identify what skills they do have and uses those skills to share stories with their children.

Was it a fact? ... Or just a great new story about a celebrity that might help sell books?

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about--Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?--we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.

Oh, I don’t mean to infer that you’re not a great guy. I’m sure you’re the exception to the rule.