The Fun in Fundamentals

I was in sixth or seventh grade when my English teacher told us we had to read Lord of the Flies. Big mistake.

Here’s what twelve-year-old me thought about that book: It sucked. There were a bunch of boys. Most of them didn’t have names because they weren’t important. One boy was good. One boy was bad. One boy was really fat and out of shape. And there was a conch. I had no idea what a conch was and I wasn’t about to look it up. I yawned when I found out the fat boy died.

Here’s what thirty-four-year-old me thinks about that book: It still sucks. I understand that it’s classic literature. I get that that it’s a thinking man’s book that takes the deep topics—common welfare, morality, groupthink, ownership, and a bunch of other stuff—and turns them all on their heads. But I still think it sucks.

Fact is, I’ve never finished Lord of the Flies. It bored the hell out of me once. I wasn't about to let that happen again.

Then there was Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, a young adult novel that asked a lot of big, existential questions. And you know what? It wasn’t half bad. It was actually pretty good.

That’s the thing, though. Thirty-year-old me liked that book. It was deep, it was well written, and it really spoke to me as an adult.

...as an adult.

Too bad thirteen-year-old me hated The Chocolate War with every fiber of his being.

Kids love dinosaurs, right!?

Ninth grade English. The Scarlet Letter. Adultery. Cool. Fourteen-year-old me liked sex. He’d never had any, but he knew what it was (sorta) and that it was awesome! Only one problem: The Scarlet Letter wasn’t really about adultery. No, all the interesting stuff—the affair, the passion, the lies—happened before the first page. The Scarlet Letter was about the shame after all that. It was about self-redemption. But there’s a reason every good porno flick ends with the money shot. No one wants to see what happens next.

But at least she got an A.

I hated William Golding before I hit puberty. Same goes for William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, and a bunch of other writers who never really stood a chance. Assigned reading ruined them all.

So goes the story of how I became an adult who doesn’t read because all those bad experiences led to negative associations.

But I wasn't alone, not by a long shot. The number one movie right now is Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which has grossed $540 million worldwide. Right now the average movie ticket in America costs $7.94. Let’s be very nice and say that if we look across the globe, the average ticket price magically jumps to $9. That means that over the last month and a half roughly 60 million people have paid to see that movie. It’s taken the book version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, the current bestselling series in America and one of the most popular books of all time, 5 years to sell 30 million copies worldwide. Tom Cruise's popcorn flick has already reached twice the audience in 1/40th of the time. That’s just sad.

96.7% of Americans own at least one television and the average person watches 34 hours and 39 minutes of TV a week. Recently, Congress was getting very worried that too many people were illegally downloading digital media. The fact is that there are millions and millions of people who want to be captivated by rich and entertaining stories. They just don’t want to have to sit down and read them.

I, of course, blame our educators.

When he was a kid, a friend of mine had to read a book report in front of his entire class. It was meant to teach him how to write and speak. His classmates laughed at him the whole time.

That bad experience led to a negative association, and now the very idea of speaking up during an office meeting gives him the shivers. Logic tells him he’d better say something if he wants that promotion. The little kid inside him is afraid that everyone will laugh at him again.

That's an extreme example, but the truth behind it carries over. How many of us adults were bored to death by Romeo and Juliet or MacBeth as teenagers? How many of us are carrying around that negative association with reading, despite the fact that we belong to a race that has been sitting around and listening to stories since the night campfires were invented.

So here’s my proposition: English teachers, school principals, and whoever else is responsible for choosing the books we shove down our kids’ throats, stop trying to mold your students into sharp and open thinkers who know the difference between a simile and a metaphor. Stop worrying so much about literary merit. Realize that the first thing your kids need to have is interest. Start worrying about getting kids to actually sit down, actually read, and actually like it.

There are books out there that kids do like. The Harry Potter books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and even The Twilight Saga have all sold very well. Say what you will about Stephanie Meyer’s writing skills. You can’t deny that she’s gotten millions of teenagers to buy book after book with their own money and read book after book on their own time. She’s gotta be doing something right.

So forget Jay Gatsby and Holden Caulfield. Teach them Sunny Bauderlane and Edward Cullen. Then maybe they’ll start paying attention. Make Hogwarts required reading and maybe your students will catch that reading bug. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll become adults who read a Sherlock Holmes mystery before they go out and spend a ton of money to watch him on the big screen.