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.