One of the most grat­i­fy­ing things that’s ever hap­pened to me in my career occurred after a school author vis­it, sign­ing books at the front of the audi­to­ri­um.  A young man hov­ered at the back of the line. He was a short, stocky Black sopho­more, shuf­fling his feet and look­ing for all the world like he didn’t want to be there. He wait­ed until every­one else had gone through the line, and then he approached. As he held out his copy of the book for me to sign, he said qui­et­ly, “This is the first book I ever finished.”

It’s dif­fi­cult to describe the lit­tle storm that hap­pened in my heart after he spoke, but if you’ve ever spent time work­ing with kids or teens—whether as a teacher, librar­i­an, author, par­ent, or volunteer—you prob­a­bly can recall the thrill that strikes in the rare moments when you real­ly reach one of them. It had nev­er occurred to me that such a thing was even pos­si­ble, that my work could be That Book for someone.

“That’s amaz­ing,” I said, keep­ing my sur­face calm some­how. “Do you think you’d like to try read­ing anoth­er one?”

He said yes, so I offered a few rec­om­men­da­tions, a cou­ple book titles as well as the names of some Black authors who held mean­ing for me. Then he went on his way.

It was the first time this had hap­pened to me, and it didn’t occur to me to ask him why. Why was this the first book that you fin­ished? Note that he didn’t say it was the first book he’d ever read, or the first book he ever picked up, but it was the first one that made him inter­est­ed enough to actu­al­ly fin­ish. What about it made it The One?

The next time this hap­pened, with a dif­fer­ent young Black man in a dif­fer­ent school, the moment was almost iden­ti­cal, from the slow reluc­tant sidle to the qui­et proud admis­sion and the “yes, I’d like to try again,” but this time I found the where­with­al to ask, “What made this a book you want­ed to finish?”

He said, “The char­ac­ters felt like peo­ple I know, and I want­ed to know what hap­pened to them because it mat­tered to me.” The book was How It Went Down, a mul­ti­ple-view­point nov­el about the con­tro­ver­sial shoot­ing of a Black teen by a white man, some­thing I wrote in response to and in con­ver­sa­tion with the Black Lives Mat­ter movement.

This sto­ry leads me to the first of three thoughts I’d like to share about encour­ag­ing young peo­ple to read: Our class­room cur­ric­u­la and our library shelves must con­tain a diverse range of books about peo­ple from many dif­fer­ent cul­tures and com­mu­ni­ties. For both of these boys, dis­cov­er­ing this book was the first time they felt like they saw them­selves in the lit­er­a­ture they were being taught. It was the first time they real­ized that books could be about them and rel­e­vant to them. We need more of that.

Since I became an aunt a few years ago, one of my great­est joys has been gift­ing my nephew with signed pic­ture books. He loves ani­mals, so I gave him Kate Messner’s Over and Under the Canyon pic­ture book, which tells a sto­ry about the desert with many ani­mals and nature ele­ments high­light­ed in the illus­tra­tions. At the back of the book, there’s a glos­sary of all the men­tioned ani­mals with more details about them. This is my nephew’s favorite book, yet he stead­fast­ly refus­es to read the sto­ry. Instead, he loves read­ing the ani­mal glos­sary over and over. I have read it out loud to him in its entire­ty dozens of times, and it’s mad­den­ing because there’s also a beau­ti­ful sto­ry in the first half of the book that I would like him to dis­cov­er and enjoy. But read­ing this way with him has taught me so much, name­ly that forc­ing him to read the book the way I pre­fer to would take the joy out of it for him.

This brings me to my sec­ond thought about how we can encour­age read­ing: Let kids engage with a book the way they want to, not the way you think they’re sup­posed to. There are many ways to enjoy a book. Some peo­ple flip to the end­ing to read it first while oth­ers find spoil­ers enrag­ing. To each their own!

I applied this les­son to my writ­ing when I wrote my non-fic­tion YA book, Rev­o­lu­tion in Our Time: The Black Pan­ther Party’s Promise to the Peo­ple. The book is a hefty 400 pages, and it includes near­ly 200 images, with an item of visu­al inter­est appear­ing on near­ly every spread. My goal was to ensure that a read­er who want­ed to pick up the book and sim­ply flip through the pic­tures would get a fair­ly com­plete sum­ma­ry of the sto­ry through the images and captions.

For my final anec­dote, I’ll draw on my own expe­ri­ence as a read­er. I’ve often found it real­ly dif­fi­cult and even painful at times to talk about my favorite books and what I like to read. It comes up a lot as an author! But I often run up against a feel­ing of shame about some of the books I like to read. Where does this shame come from? Part­ly it comes from my shy­ness about reveal­ing myself—a person’s read­ing pref­er­ences can actu­al­ly be an inti­mate detail to share. But anoth­er part of it comes from the labels we as a cul­ture, we as edu­ca­tors, we as a lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ty put on cer­tain books. Peo­ple who love books tend to val­ue lit­er­ary qual­i­ty, which is not itself a bad thing, but it can do some harm when it comes to how we talk about the many books that don’t meet this stan­dard. For exam­ple, why do we feel com­pelled to talk about cer­tain books as “guilty plea­sure” reads? 

So, my final thought about encour­ag­ing read­ing is: Cel­e­brate what­ev­er books a young per­son wants to read. Find out why they love them. Be a voice in their lives who finds val­ue in all kinds of sto­ries rather than one who insists that they read books you per­son­al­ly deem “good.” And, yes, this can apply to con­tent as well as lit­er­ary mer­it. Cel­e­brate the kid who wants to read about death and destruc­tion, the one who will only read graph­ic lit, the one who obsess­es over hor­ror, the one who can’t stand sad end­ings or is over­whelmed by any­thing too emo­tion­al­ly seri­ous. We need the books we need for rea­sons we can’t always under­stand, and it is heal­ing to have spaces where that is rec­og­nized as not mere­ly okay but tru­ly wonderful.

Hap­py reading!