Really good article over at the Washington Post site called
Why Johnny Won't Read by Jon Scieszka. (In our household it was definitely harder to make a reader out of Mike than out of the girls -- now that he's 18 he reads for pleasure more than he ever did, but sometimes he still needs to be reminded he enjoys it. As he left for the airport today for his summer job I handed him a thick Sherlock Holmes collection and told him he'd like it. Also I want him to get some of the weird jokes/resonances in a story I just wrote called
A Study In Emerald, which is the nearest I'll probably come to doing a Kim Newman- or Alan Moore-style literary alternate history.)
If you have guys, particularly young guys, who need to read you could do much worse than send them to
http://www.guysread.com/. And go there yourself and poke around. Jon Scieszka has a point -- and I'm pleased to see him listing
Watchmen and graphic novels generally on the site. (Reading is reading. And, as I once pointed out to a teacher who was sounding off against comics [I would have been about 11 at the time] I had the biggest vocabulary in the school, because I'd got most of my long words as a young kid from Stan Lee --
and I knew how to spell them.)
