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

Hope you all were able to catch me on TODAY this morning, talking about my old friend Alex Cross. For those of you who like to sleep in, here's what you missed:

Here's another interesting clip to share and get you thinking, "What are your favorite children's books?"

I’d love to hear your own picks here on the blog.

...And here’s some good ones to get you started in case you’re a bit rusty.

JP

I may be the bestselling author in the country these days, but I didn’t always love books.

In fact, I didn’t even like reading until I found myself in a mental institution. WORKING in a mental institution. (Summer job.)

I’d graduated from high school as a valedictorian, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t or didn’t read when I had to. I doubt I would have passed English class, much less gotten a good grade, if I hadn’t been able to trudge through Silas Marner.

But there I was after high school in a psychiatric facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, (where, interestingly enough, some famous folks you may have heard of were patients, but I'm not telling) doing the night watch—which entailed sitting up all night making sure the patients didn’t attempt suicide—and they had a library with some really random books in it. And because I was bored out of my skull, and had a ton of time to kill, I started picking them up and leafing through them. And then I started reading one. And then another. And then another. And, before I knew it, I was picking books up even when I wasn’t on duty.

I think a lot of it had to do with me being in control of the situation. There was something about it being me choosing the books for myself that made them more palatable during than all those years of them being force-fed me by teachers. And, of course, a lot of it had to do with the books themselves.

I’m not going suggest you throw your just-reading child at the work of some of the French existentialists I found in that institution’s library, but way back then—as now—schools, for whatever reasons, often select books that just don’t work for kids.

And because kids often first—and sometimes only—experience books at school, this is really unfortunate. Because, as you know, if you have a bad experience with something, you tend not to want to try it again.

We humans are kind of smart like that.

But we’re not smart when we take a bad experience and over-generalize. Until that summer after high school, and simply because I hadn’t enjoyed one yet, I thought all books were stupid and boring.

And that wasn’t very bright of me because, as I later discovered, books can be the best, most addictive, educational, and door-opening entertainment in the whole world.

I expect we’re all on the same page when we say we’d rather see our kids reading a book than watching hours of television or playing mind-numbing video games—or out succumbing to peer pressure and doing things worse than that—but I’d of course suggest that most of the successful and happy people out there aren’t just able to read. They actually like reading, and do it on their own.

In the coming weeks and months I’m going to be sharing some examples of what I’m talking about here, tips about books that—unlike those your kids might be forced to read in the school curriculum—they actually might want to read, and other pieces of advice and hopefully wisdom I’ve picked up in my years as an author, father, and late-blooming reader.

Thank you for reading.