Choosing books

How do you encourage people to read?

Our tutoring consultant normally avoids handling English as a subject.  He does have a good command of the language and is widely-read, including most of the important works of literature.  But he doesn’t know the rules.  He picked up his skills mostly through reading a lot, that is, through many good examples.  That is an effective way of learning.  However, when a student has an assignment due next week, “Read a lot” is not useful advice.

But “read a lot” is still decent advice for the longer term.  Not only is it a relatively painless way to pick up vocabulary, reading a book stimulates other higher-order skills, in the handling of ideas and connections between them.  Being able to interpret a possibly complex passage has application well outside the English class itself.  A long book (we’re not talking about War and Peace here, just a reasonable novel) requires a certain patience and the ability to grasp many things happening.

But how can we get students to read actual books when there is so much other distraction around?  Well, we remember getting enthusiastic about Science Fiction sometime about Junior High.  That often led us to ignore the TV, which some people had declared would kill reading entirely.  Other students had other passions.  So our tutor is slowly building up examples of genre fiction in the center where he works.  He’s tried not to emphasize his own tastes, but there is some classic SF there.  He has also included crime novels (Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot), fantasy, even a Cold War spy novel.  (We’re really curious about what students nowadays think of that one.)  He should include more historical fiction, but hasn’t decided what period would work best.  Would The Three Musketeers appeal to the same people as Ivanhoe?  At any rate, he has included one Horatio Hornblower book.

Certainly the language of an older (say, nineteenth-century) novel can be a barrier.  At the same time, we know of one accomplished photographer (and thus not a professional student of literature) who found the archaicism of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur a positive attraction.

So far our tutor has made no serious attempt to include poetry, because responses to that form are so varied and personal.  (He did find an inexpensive edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and placed in the shelf, because students will see references to it.)  Also, he has tried to avoid books that students have seen or will see in school.  Having to study a work often takes all the attraction out, and the idea is to present something the student will absorb willingly.

What else should our tutor place in his little library?  What do you read for yourself?