A Rated-R Proposal
get those "reluctant readers" into books
When I was a kid, I hated reading. It was boring. It was stupid. It couldn’t compare to movies.
A kindly librarian probably would have labeled me a “reluctant reader,” a term I would’ve thought. I wasn’t reluctant to read, I fuckin’ hated it.
I bet several people are starting to understand why this newsletter is the way it is. “Oh, he was functionally illiterate until like last year. This is all coming together.”
“Reluctant reader” is just a silly term. Saying kids who hate reading are reluctant to do it is like saying I’m “reluctant” to play Monopoly with a blended family on Thanksgiving, I have to be the banker, and everyone but me is a little drunk. I might consider flinging myself down the stairs until I got a bad enough injury that I could leave for the emergency room.
“Reluctant reader” would be like describing me as “harboring reservations” if I was brought in by the CIA to torture a suspect for something, and they just whisked me off into a room with a bunch of power tools.
I wasn’t a “reluctant” reader, I wasn’t any kind of reader at all. And I do resent sometimes that people try and put kids in that “reluctant” box over and over again.
I get it, it comes from a good-hearted place. We don’t want to give up on kids who don’t read, and we shouldn’t assume they’ll never learn to enjoy it, get an English degree, work as a librarian, write some books, write a weekly newsletter about librarianship…
What Changed?
I got on a reading kick, and I started reading stuff that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to read. The summer before 8th grade, I read about Hunter S. Thompson coating the floor of a car with ether.
I wasn’t supposed to read it, is the thing. An almost-8th-grader has no business reading about drug use, let alone Hunter S. Thompson, heroic level of drug use. This was totally the opposite of what I was learning in D.A.R.E.
And, now that I mention it, I had a history with this sort of thing. I got real into Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Goosebumps. Why? Because it felt like I wasn’t supposed to read them. It felt like something that I wouldn’t be allowed to watch on TV (even though the Goosebumps TV show ended up being pretty tame, and looking back, the stories aren’t all that gruesome. But to a 2nd grader, that shit’s like a gonzo slasher, Faces of Death or something!).
The Proposal
If your kid is a “reluctant reader” or just fuckin’ hates reading because it sucks, I have an option for you:
Let your kid read things you’d never let them watch.
If you have rules about Rated R movies in your house, hey, make an amendment: if you read the novelization first, I’ll let you watch the movie.
Maybe you’d never let your kids watch IT, and maybe you’ve heard enough about the book to never let them read that, either. But if you loosen the rules up, and if you stick to it, you might be surprised.
The Core
The idea here is that I thought I didn’t like books and reading when I was young, but the truth is, I didn’t like the specific books and reading I had to do for school. Because it’s boring. It’s meant to be boring. It’s curriculum, decided on by way too many people with way too many concerns.
Move reading out of that territory. Make it a different activity. Your kid might still hate it, but hey, at least their hate will be well-informed.