I think your statement about active and passive reading, that "I don't think we are as accustomed to using those YA English Major tools in nonfiction" is right on the money. When Louise Rosenblatt first started discussing efferent and aesthetic reading, she firmly believed (and did so throughout her career) that the former came from nonfiction and the latter through fiction. But, aesthetic responses can come through all kinds of nonfiction, even those accounts that aren't written as story narratives. I see the sentence (and we can quibble about the number later) "six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust" and that one mathematical figure prompts an aesthetic, emotional response. I see kids who read books like the Guinness Book of World Records and again take that stance: What would it be like to have the longest fingernails in the world? Could you pick your nose? Even photographs bring emotional responses; think of the jackets of Seymour Simon's Snakes or Nic Bishop's Spiders. And one of the more common examples of aesthetic reading is that of cookbooks. I remember my mother, who had major heart problems, reading cookbooks from New Orleans -- all which started with "take a certain amount of lard." I asked her why in the world she was reading such, she certainly couldn't cook from it, and she said she was just imagining what it would taste like. And I do the same; I take a receipt and wonder if I should add more basil or use bread crumbs rather than flour, and I'm involved with aesthetic reading with little more than a list of instructions.

Like Monica did earlier, I'm using two posts because of paragraphing. I think for some time nonfiction writers have been looking for active involvement from readers. Think of Seymour Simon's early book, Animal Fact, Animal Fiction, or Patricia Lauber's A Tree Is Nice. Both asked questions and expected the reader (or to be more accurate, probably the listener) to respond. And such is quite natural in storytime sessions. But these attempts at active reading are growing more sophisticated and being aimed at older youngsters. Jim Murphy's book on the Alamo outlines the information we have (or don't have or think we have) about the Alamo, how information has changed but the legends may have remained the same. And Peter Sis's Tree of Life demands that the reader become Darwin -- to see the world as did Darwin, even down to those minute illustrations of numbers of animals. Viki Cobb's series (particularly the books on wind and water) create an entirely different reading experience. They state a concept, expect the child to interrupt the listening with an experiment that demonstrates that concept, and then pick back up with yet another concept and another experiment. What we have to learn to do is deal with these kinds of presentations in much the same way we had to learn to deal with unreliable narrators.