Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students "a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question." The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a "banal" story like this tiger-cub number admits "multiple interpretations," and the prod to "reduce the work to a single idea" does a disservice to both reader and text.

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Laura also asked readers to weigh in on their least favorite books from their school days, and you were quick to volunteer (there are nearly 200 comments on the article so far).

So, which books won't we be finding on your grown-up bookshelves, with 8th-grade annotations and yellowed endpapers lovingly preserved?

Well, for one thing, some of you really, really don't like "Ethan Frome." In your eyes, it's not just "tedious." It's also "bleak," "depressing" and "insufferable" enough to "[crush] your soul." And if anything, "Silas Marner" is even more unpopular; one commenter quipped that it ought to be "hurled into the Mariana Trench."

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With September looming, we thought it would be a good time to check in with some of our favorite authors -- and some of the writers you're likely to be reading this fall -- to see what they really read this summer. Click through the following slide show to see what they had to say.

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The occasional triumph (and perhaps only a fellow recommender will appreciate just how sweet such instances can be) are inevitably balanced out by mortifying failures. Though it was over a decade ago, I'll never forget the time a friend chewed me out for suggesting she read Louise Erdrich's "The Beet Queen." It seemed the perfect choice after I'd ruminated on all the other novels she said she'd liked, but she complained that Erdrich's women characters were all "victims" who refused to do anything to improve their lot.

Can a task this ineffable be automated? Many seem to think so. For years, Amazon and other e-booksellers have offered their customers suggestions based on the purchases of other customers who bought the same books. But you don't necessarily read every book you buy from an online retailer (some are gifts) and you probably don't like every book you read, either. For that matter, the books you like best you may have bought elsewhere, or borrowed from a friend.

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Actually, it might be too easy. A much better sense of Emma's sensibility -- cool Britannia like Prefab Sprout, Cocteau Twins, Billy Bragg and Everything But the Girl alongside English major mainstays Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading -- appears on author and screenwriter David Nicholls' website. Nicholls has imagined the two mix tapes Emma gives Dexter (one from 1989, the other from 2000) and created Spotify and iTunes playlists where they can be streamed or purchased.

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Too many books would make this something of a busman's holiday for a reviewer, but I've packed a big stack all the same. Vacations, with their seclusion, quiet and idleness, invite long bouts of reading. Or, rather, they do when they don't involve visiting a big city, staying with chatty relatives or herding kids. All too often, the books treasured up for the summer are still unread on Labor Day.

So why not plan a vacation devoted exclusively to reading? Twice annually, Bill Gates schedules a week-long "reading retreat" during which he does nothing but pore over the books and papers he's set aside during the year. He's not alone: The idea seems particularly popular in the UK, where you can sign up at London's School of Life to receive a customized book list (they have "bibliotherapists" on staff to compile one based on a telephone consultation) and lodging in one of several modern country houses. The website promises "the perfect combination of great books and great architecture."

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"The Invisible Library" has, for at least a decade or so, referred to those books that exist only within works of fiction. A man named Brian Quinette founded a website by that name in the late 1990s, presenting it as a catalog of "imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished and unfound."

The original Invisible Library disappeared from the Web in the mid-2000s (though you can still find snapshots of it in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine), and since then other pseudobibliophiles have opened their own "branches," although these too have a tendency to end up abandoned. The novelists Ed Park and Levi Stahl created a catalog of imaginary titles that inspired an interactive exhibition at a London art gallery, but they have only occasionally updated it since 2008. Loss of interest is, perhaps, inevitable, since when you maintain such a list, tiresome people are constantly proclaiming their disappointed astonishment that their particular obscure favorite isn't listed.

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Some people don't like fiction and never have. That's quite different from having once read fiction avidly and then, in the fullness of time, giving it up. To judge informally (that is, according to what people tell me when they learn I'm a book reviewer), the latter is far from an uncommon experience. Many former devourers of novels haven't stopped reading, they've just come, like Roth, to prefer nonfiction books on history, science or politics.

Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn't offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: "I don't know. I wised up ..." he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he's determined that reading other people's novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it's like to fall under the sway of a master's voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn't enjoy other authors' fiction because "It uses the same muscles that I use to write with." Still, it's improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.

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As if hell-bent on providing further illustration of this dilemma, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul played the provocateur last week by announcing that he is a better writer than any woman who has ever lived. He offered a variety of reasons for this state of affairs, none of them worth repeating. While his remarks lacked intellectual content, his antics did inspire some thoughtful responses, many of which have pointed out that talented artists can be reprehensible people.

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But I am going to quarrel, just a little, and not because "A Jane Austen Education" isn't a delightful and enlightening book. It is both of those things. Furthermore, Austen's reputation is sinking, quicksand-style, into that of a purveyor of romantic wish-fulfillment and empire-waist nostalgia; Deresiewicz offers it a gallant hand up. His book is a reminder of why she has long been regarded as among the greatest novelists of the English language, even by those who do not swoon for Colin Firth. The legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (a man of the world if there ever was one), when asked if he found the time to read novels, replied that indeed he did: "All six of them, every year."

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By far the most common gripe from readers was too much description, particularly environmental description -- that is, of landscape, weather and interiors. This complaint struck me as especially pertinent because at that very moment I was trying to decide whether or not to recommend Tea Obreht's "The Tiger's Wife" in our weekly book column, What to Read. Obreht, recently named one of the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40, is undeniably talented, and the novel has much to recommend it. Yet no sooner does Obreht's narrative work up a little momentum or present a masterful scene than it hits a patch of long, dozy paragraphs filled with way too much detail about the scenery.

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Someone runs a tally like this every decade or so, inevitably revealing that little has changed. The situation is distressing, yet mysteriously intractable; after the third or fourth iteration, there doesn't seem to be much new to say about it. This time around, however, three women on staff at the New Republic decided to dig a little deeper. A common response to the complaint that few books by women are reviewed in major literary publications is to ask whether fewer books by women are published in the first place. As Ruth Franklin reports, this does seem to be the case.

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Not so. A recent study out of Princeton, and brought to wider attention by Jonah Lehrer at Wired.com, suggests that ugly, irregular fonts can boost the amount of information readers retain from a text, while easy-to-read type is more likely to just sort of slide out of their minds. The study, titled "Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes," found that people remembered more from worksheets and PowerPoint presentations when they were composed in a hot mess of hated fonts like Monotype Corsiva, Haettenshweiler and the dreaded Comic Sans Italic.

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My own personal resolutions? First, I vowed to read more books about science in 2010. In this I was mostly successful. One title -- Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" -- even wound up on my best-of-the-year list. That book was fairly light sledding, though, given how gracefully Skloot weaves together the story of 20th-century medical research with the lives of one American family, always keeping the human element in play.

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The National Assessment of Educational Progress, referred to at the Nation's Report Card, tested 52,000 students in reading and 49,000 in math across 1,670 school districts in 2009.

Students scored an average of 288 out of 500 points in reading comprehension, two points above the 2005 score but still below the 1992 average of 292. Thirty-eight percent of 12th grade students were classified as at or above the "proficient" level, while 74 percent were considered at or above "basic."

"Today's report suggests that high school seniors' achievement in reading and math isn't rising fast enough to prepare them to succeed in college and careers," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

Cornelia S. Orr, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees development tests, said she was encouraged by the fact reading scores had gone up in recent years.

"And we'd like it to get back up to the level it once was," she said.

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That was part of it, I realized, trying to analyze my own ridiculous, knee-jerk judgment of this stranger. I couldn't see what she was reading, and it bothered me. I couldn't peer in that tiny window onto someone's interior world, or delight in the juxtaposition that a book choice sometimes presents -- when you notice a stuffy, 90-something grandma buried in a trashy romance novel, or a would-be gangsta engrossed in "Love in the Time of Cholera."

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A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

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One weekend into owning the thing and I've only managed to watch half an episode of "Black Adder." I have yet to play a single game. What I've mostly been doing on the iPad is reading, because this much-ballyhooed harbinger of the future turns out to be the ideal device for that most old-fashioned of leisure activities.

One of the very first things I read was an early draft of Joan Walsh's review of the new Barack Obama biography by David Remnick. While I was eager to see what Joan had to say about the book, I wasn't looking forward to having to read it on my laptop. I've always found it difficult to fully concentrate on longer, in-depth stories on my computer unless I was actually working on them as an editor or writer. In the past, when I've needed to really think hard about a longer text, I've even resorted to that terribly analog (not to mention wasteful) practice of printing it out and carrying it off to my sofa to read in peace.

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"The Wind in the Willows," published 100 years ago this year, is one of those books. I first read Kenneth Grahame's classic when I was 14, and I have been going back to it ever since. I just read it again, and its wonders seem greater than ever, its colors more glowing, its language more miraculous. Although it is uniquely mixed in style and matter, moving effortlessly from deadpan observation to piercing lyricism to raucous comedy to incantatory mysticism, it is a complete world. And like the old friend that it is, it always welcomes you back.

At the end of the fifth of its 12 perfect chapters, the Mole, who has rediscovered his old home, lays his head on his pillow in utter contentment. "But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancor." Opening "The Wind in the Willows" again always feels like that to me.

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