Thank you, Terrie and Sandi, for replying to that last post and, Jocelyn, I’m impressed you found that excerpt for the next Maximum Ride book. For all you parents who aren’t aware of the Maximum Ride series, it’s written for readers of all ages, from 10 to 110. I’m careful with the language and content and everybody seems to love the books.
Staying on the subject of Maximum Ride, I just returned from Hollywood and can tell you the books are headed to the silver screen. Avi Arad, who made Spiderman, and Sony Pictures will be making the movie-version.
Ironically, just last week I blogged about how movies often aren’t as good as the books, but hope does spring eternal and sometimes movies-based-on-books are pretty good. I think the Harry Potter films, for instance, are entertaining.
And that sparks another idea that may be useful for those of us embarked on turning kids into readers.
Find a movie your kids might be into that’s based on a book. For example, The Spiderwick Chronicles will be out in February. Or The Golden Compass is out now. Or try Holes, which you should be able to rent. The important thing is to find a movie your kid wants to see and to harness their interest by giving them the book before they see it.
Oh, and if you have some suggestions of great books that have been turned—or are getting turned—into decent movies, why don’t you share them? Maybe we can build a list here for us all to reference.
JP
You may have heard Ingmar Bergman died this past summer. Or you may not have. He was a very smart, creative man, and a favorite of critics and students of film.
But I believe he’s probably not as famous as Walt Disney or Steven Spielberg because he made what most of us call “art-house” films. His films are popular with “expert” film watchers, people who watch tons of movies and are looking for more than just a good, clean, popular entertainment, but they don’t hold any major box-office records.
All that to say, if people’s first movie-going experience was with Ingmar Bergman films, I suspect movies wouldn’t be as popular as they are today.
This is something we know about books, too. Part of the reason they’re not as popular as movies these days is because too often, for instance, an eighth grade English teacher assigns a paper on Silas Marner or some other “classic” chosen by academic professionals, but that is not suitable for fledgling readers. And then that class comes to the conclusion that reading is a drag.
This happened to me, and I daresay it’s happening every week to untold thousands of kids around the world.
And that is yet another reason why it’s so important that we parents, as we’ve been discussing, make the effort to be the first to introduce our kids—who we know better than any teacher ever will—to the right books.
To that end, I should mention that for all of you who’ve been looking for some concrete recommendations from little old me, you ought to check out a piece I did for Parade magazine (which is carried in a lot of local papers) this weekend.
They’re running a letter I wrote to my son, Jack, and a list of some books I truly hope he loves.
Have a great week,
JP
Hope you liked that reading-late tip from last week. As Michelle, Terry and Zanna (who commented on it) I think would agree, there is something special about staying up with a book. If you’re at all open to the thought, please give it a try with your kid and—in a month or so—let me know how things worked out.
This time, I thought I’d just pose a thought-starter that occurred to me while Sue and I were up in New York so I could do publicity stuff for the latest Alex Cross novel, Double Cross, and meet with my publisher—about this year’s awards for volunteers, booksellers, teachers, librarians, and other people who are out there spreading the joy of reading. (If you’re in this category, or know somebody who is, please go to pattersonpageturner.org.)
Jack, my son, was a little mad at us for going without him—especially since I had a talk at the original Apple Store in SoHo and he’s an Apple fanatic—but fourth grade comes first. (If you have iTunes, give it a *free* listen here.)
While we were at the Apple event, he e-mailed Sue with his spelling homework. He did well except for spelling “perilous,” which he had as “perilles,” but that’s not an easy word.
English, of course, is full of not-so-easy words, and it’s no wonder lots of people never get proficient at reading, much less confident enough to enjoy books.
But, of course, if we hadn’t learn to read, we’d all probably still be living in trees and caves, and maybe I’d be logging rather than blogging.
All that to say when we get our kids reading, we need to remember it’s a big challenge, perhaps the single biggest challenge in their entire education. And that’s why we need to be really smart and take advantage of the best tools out there to encourage them.
More to come next Thursday on just that subject.
JP
Okay, as promised, here’s the first of some practical thoughts for getting kids into the reading habit:
This one’s courtesy of a friend of mine & Sue’s. It came up over dinner at their house the other night. Get your kids a good reading lamp, either battery-powered or plug-in, and institute a new rule: They can stay up an hour (or more or less) past their usual bedtime if, and only if, they spend it reading. I don’t know about your kids, but in my experience nothing seems special to kids like having permission to stay up later than usual. Why not have them start associating reading with this special-ness?
Wanted to mention a couple other things, too.
One is that I really enjoy your comments on the blog here. Please keep them coming and I’ll try to respond to some of you as we go along.
The other is that as this gift-season approaches, I’d be remiss to not remember that a lot of kids don’t have adults like us out there working to help them become readers. To that end, if you're thinking of making any charitable gifts this season, I’d like to point out that First Book—whose mission is to get books into the hands of kids who have never had one before—has a deal going where for every dollar you give through the end of the year, they'll get at least one entire book into the hands of an underprivileged child. Anyhow, just a thought.
Happy reading,
JP
So I’m reading The New York Times this morning and I come across an article, “Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading,” and I go, "Hmm, I should probably read this one, being a parent and an author and all that." And it begins, “. . .Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside . . .” and I’m like, "Hey, is that James Patterson as in. . . !?"
Needless to say, I’ve read articles with less provocation than that, and it did end up being a thought-stirring piece. For the first time in my memory, smart people in the book industry are addressing the fact that it’s not just that young people are reading less, but that they “appear to be reading less for fun.”
Now there’s the under-rated concept of the new millennium—people do better with things when they’re having fun at them!
Of course it’s a wisdom good teachers, good parents, and good habit-changers of all kinds have always known.
It’s also why I created the PageTurner awards. They’re purposely not about identifying and giving money to folks who say reading is critically important for future success, but finding those teachers, booksellers, librarians, community volunteers and others who are communicating that reading is a joy. (If you know anybody like that—including yourself—please stop by the awards’ site and let us know about them.)
It’s important that we all realize that reading is a crucial habit. But being aware of that and knowing how to do something about it are two different things. One truth I think we can hold to be self-evident: The pursuit of happiness is a little harder for our children to undertake if they don’t see the happiness they can have in their “academic” pursuits.
More soon on how we can show kids the enormous happiness that can be found in books—but right now I’ve got to go finish off what I hope is a “fun” manuscript for my publisher.
Have a happy Thanksgiving.
JP
