What Makes a Good Book: Revisited

by Amber Miller

April 1, 2025

It's critical to revisit the question: What makes a good book? As I shared in a previous blog post, "the right book, at the right time, can span the divide between where the reader stands in this moment and alternate views, new ideas, and options not yet considered" (Laminack & Kelly, 2019, p. xiii). Books can be mirrors, windows, and doors. Books can also be barriers, reminders of frustrations, and perhaps even failures.

One of the most extensive and cited studies of independent reading found that the amount of time students spent reading outside of school was the best predictor of reading achievement (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988).

The chart above illustrates this key finding: an extremely wide gap between the number of words higher-achieving students read and the number of words read by lower-achieving students.

Think about it this way: the study found that students achieving at the 90th percentile read approximately 2,357,000 words per year, while students achieving at the 10th percentile read around 51,000 words per year. Students in the 90th percentile reported, on average, reading 40 minutes a day outside of school, but those in the 10th percentile reported an average of only around 1 minute of reading per day.

Guthrie (2004) asserted that achievement is closely related to engagement, explaining that “engagement and achievement are reciprocal. Locked in a spiral, they grow together…With increased reading, students’ fluency and knowledge expand, which in turn improves word recognition. Contributing to this spiral is a sense of identity and selfhood; improving readers see themselves as capable is gratifying. Beyond self-confidence, however, students on the upward spiral see themselves as readers who are learners and thinkers; these students internalize literacy as a part of who they are” (p. 6). Harvey and Ward (2017) liken readers to drivers, noting "readers acquire confidence by logging miles in books; they recognize challenges they have seen and navigated before. They judge when to slow down, stop, veer around, or keep going" (p. 147).

So, how do we get students in the driver's seat as readers? How do we help them see literacy as a part of their identity? Good books matter. Books such as "Mirrors, Windows, and Doors" and others that feel accessible and achievable. This way, we can customize our libraries for students with reading difficulties to include “low effort-to-reward” books (Harvey & Ward, 2017). Some students need to feel what it's like to be a reader again, or maybe for the first time. Low-effort-to-reward books consider the effort required (e.g., the length of the text or the number of words on a page) and the reward (e.g., compelling characters, enticing illustrations, engaging plots, or interesting topics).