title: Why Jane and John Couldn't Read--And How They Learned: A New Look at Striving Readers
author:  Rosalie Fink 
description: ''One of those rare books that raises and answers a fascinating question: How do some severely impaired dyslexics manage to master reading and to succeed in their life pursuits?''
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  Readers are different these days.
  
  
  But not in the way so many social critics assert. Today's readers aren't worse
  readers than their predecessors or more shallow or less discriminating—far
  from it. Anyone who reads fiction for pleasure instead of watching television,
  playing video games, or surfing the Web is probably a very experienced, very
  educated reader—not necessarily someone with a PhD in literature, but someone
  educated in how stories work. In fact, they often know more, consciously or
  subconsciously, about story structure than we writers do.
  
  
  Think about it: A reader who has read three hundred mystery stories is hard to
  fool. She notes that casual mention of Deborah's grandmother's brooch,
  immediately labels it a "clue," and puts Deborah in the suspect column. A
  thriller reader has had his fill of stalkers—another isn't going to chill him
  much. A reader of romances has seen a hundred couples paired off happily, and
  when she's three c