Every other day or so here at Study Hut Tutoring we’ll have a student of ours do a reading assignment in here with us. A lot of kids that we have do this moan and whine “reading is boring, reading sucks, I suck at reading.”
Reading first and foremost should be entertaining. When I talk to the kids who say “reading sucks” about what books they’ve read, they really haven’t delved one iota into the many different kinds of writing and modern attempts at deviate characters that make the last century of literature so interesting. It’s not that I’m dead crazy about reading, it’s not like every book under the sun rocks my world.
What I like to tell the kids who say reading sucks is that they’ve always read about the archetypal hero in books they’ve been assigned in school, but the real fun is in reading books about the anti-hero. The anti-hero is a character like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, like the narrator of Fight Club and Choke, the anti-hero is like the dark and mysterious Batman or the controversial William Burroughs. Some of my favorite anti-heroes are made by Kurt Vonnegut.
I can’t think of a better place to tell my students to look for fun, dark and hilarious, interesting reading than Kurt Vonnegut. It was my Dad who told me to read Kurt Vonnegut and in the year after reading Cat’s Cradle, I went on to read six more Vonnegut novels.
Part of what I’m saying is addressed to the kids who come in to Study Hut: don’t blow off reading because the books you read in school weren’t fun, reading about the hero sucks when you could be reading about the anti-hero. The other part is to parents: my Dad showed me what books were fun and cool for him, and in turn those same books were fun and cool for me. Do the same for your kids.
