  urlLink The New York Times > Education Life > Reading: 'Underpants' Before the Darkness : "Teachers face a complicated task when choosing books to recommend or assign, as they weigh what their students ought to read, are able to read and might actually like to read. But what if students could be unfettered from message-heavy classroom reading lists? What if they could escape educational literary agendas and the nostalgic promotion of classics by parents who control the family book-buying budget? (While noting how I often nudge him to read my old favorites, my 12-year-old recently suggested that I read his. This is how ''The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy'' and four sequels came to live on my nightstand. ) Each year, more than 100 million books are sold through school fairs run by Scholastic. The fairs are hardly unfiltered buying experiences. Before shopping, their money zipped into plastic sandwich bags, the children are often shown videos that steer them toward selected new titles. Some students never get past the piles of television and movie spinoff books that Scholastic sells. (A Haymarket 6-year-old named Foster Shafer bought a book about the basketball player Yao Ming because he had seen him in a commercial.
) Others are drawn to holographic covers, or books adorned with silvery lockets or charms. The Mountain View fair immediately sold out of ''Spy Survival Handbook'' with its attached metal decoder, good for exchanging coded notes. Still, a book fair is as good a place as any to measure what sort of reading children enjoy when given the freedom to shop independently..." 
