I under­stand that there are many effec­tive approach­es to encour­ag­ing mid­dle grade and YA read­ing, and that many of these can go to war against the pre­vail­ing cul­tur­al lethar­gy that has allowed kids to believe that read­ing is unim­por­tant. (A neigh­bor­ing kid­do of mine who has gone on to become the pres­i­dent of his real estate cor­po­ra­tion once bragged to me on the day of his high school grad­u­a­tion that he had made it through the last four years with­out read­ing a sin­gle book. He meant to impress me.) But I won­der tru­ly if one of the huge entice­ments to read­ing might sim­ply be to mod­el it — that kids might be encour­aged to read because they see the adults in their life read­ing: a par­ent, a grand­par­ent, an aunt, a teacher, the employ­er encoun­tered in a high schooler’s first job, the reli­gious instruc­tor, the neigh­bor on her porch, the car­pool­ing adult or the school bus dri­ver who throws a paper­back on the dash­board, the scout leader, the cafe­te­ria lady wait­ing between shifts, the prin­ci­pal, the librar­i­an, the pas­tor or rabbi.

I recall my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harknet, who kept books on her desk that were not teacher books, aimed at the job. They were nov­els, and she read them dur­ing breaks — or dur­ing our read­ing — and some­times she’d chuck­le, or laugh out loud, or go to the board and write down a word or a phrase she’d just read. She obvi­ous­ly loved read­ing, and it made me—a poor read­er in fourth grade — want to love it too. I remem­ber Mr. Ains­ley, our world his­to­ry teacher, read­ing with a lead pen­cil in his mouth, which he would some­times retrieve to under­line some pas­sage. When we asked what he was read­ing, he would always answer “Herodotus,” or “Thucy­dides,” or “Tac­i­tus,” and some­times he would stop and read pas­sages writ­ten two thou­sand years ago — and he made them thrilling.

My band teacher’s com­mit­ment to his art was an inspi­ra­tion to me, and I thought of him when I began to dare to try my own hand at some­thing I might some­day send to a pub­lish­er. And it is unques­tion­able that the read­ers whom I met along the way, com­mit­ted read­ers who under­stood and enjoyed the art of read­ing, were mod­els — are mod­els — to my own com­mit­ment to read­ing, which is the basis for my love of writ­ing. So when I hear these days that high school stu­dents don’t read Catch­er in the Rye any­more because — wait for it — it’s too long, or that The Great Gats­by is now being taught by hav­ing kids read the first two chap­ters, fol­lowed by a sum­ma­ry of the rest of the book, how can any­one not rec­og­nize that some­thing ter­ri­bly impor­tant has been lost: the pos­si­bil­i­ty that some­one might be tak­en up by the lan­guage and plot and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a great nov­el. It is almost as if we can­not imag­ine that that might be true.