Originally posted on Penny Kittle’s Substack on May 25, 2025. Republished with permission from the author.
See the little girl in pigtails crouched on the worn wooden floor of the living room, knees up to prop her picture book at a readable height. Watch her realize a word arises out of sounds she blends in a moment of curiosity, of problem-solving, a moment of knowing. Reading is a puzzle she can solve.
Her chest fills with light. Somehow she knows how big this is. She can read.
We expect this skill in all little ones. It will happen in the early years at home if you’re blessed like me with a Mom who reads Winnie the Pooh out loud at night with all the voices she imagines. And it will happen in school for most. We understand that time and methods vary, but it happens. The skill of reading evolves with steady effort and opportunity. Books abound…visit a library and investigate the stacks. Cart a few home.
The Montavilla Public Library in Portland, Oregon allowed me to check out eight books a week when I visited with Mom. I could build a stack in minutes: the shelves so tall; the books so inviting.
My will to read was all about the what. I gorged on one series (Encyclopedia Brown) and then another (The Great Brain, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings) because my attachment to characters and places was insatiable. Reading as an escape from the confines of home? Yes, please. The possibility of little people who lived in a cupboard borrowing from us? Delightful. I remember sneaking up on our stereo console to pop open the lid, expecting to see the Borrowers there. I left buttons and coins on my dresser for them.
I played tennis and basketball throughout middle school. I criss-crossed shady roads on my bike through Mt. Tabor Park, and I read books. I grew taller, got braces, walked to the local K-8 school and continued to read widely with the help of both school and town librarians…oblivious to the fact that books were scarce in other homes and schools.
So at what point does the intersection of schooling and the reading lives of young people support or squelch interest and engagement? Certainly you’ve seen the recent essays and rants about adolescents who won’t read in school—even in Ivy League colleges. There are many threads to this. The complexity of the issue is challenging and idiosyncratic. What I need isn’t what you need—and one teacher is expected to manage it all. (I’ve been that “one teacher” for 41 years and thousands of students.) In my case, by sixth grade, we were assigned silly color-coded boxes of SRA cards that I tolerated to earn passes to the school library where I could freely read. The research-backed importance of volume, fluency, and stamina in developing skill in readers was realized for me because of the joy I found in books.
If the only books available had been auto parts guides and the ABC’s of minerals, I would have glanced at the pages and jumped on my bike to escape. I hungered for story. I was the flashlight-under-the-covers kid craving one more hit before sleep.
So why did my reading life lurch to a stop in 9th grade? I was cursed to be placed in honors English, and I was handed a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my first day. My teacher explained, “This is a book about a family of sisters who want to get married.” I could read it—but the first chapter was a punishment. The distance between Elizabeth Bennett and me was canyon-sized. I was tied to a chair-desk combo of steel and formica as I listened in stunned boredom to my grey-haired teacher read aloud. I skimmed ahead. It didn’t get any better.
I was 13. My father was a nervous rattler, always tense, a moment away from striking out. (This new snake-like self was an upgrade, however, from the weaving, puking one slouched red-eyed in front of the Mary Tyler Moore show.) He had clawed his way out of a decades-long addiction to alcohol, and we were all grateful. But marriage? My mother’s willful imprisonment in this chaos did little to inspire me. I would never marry—which was easy to promise in my teens.
Give me back Tolkien, please, I have more in common with hobbits than prim British girls. Sadly, my disinterest didn’t end with Jane. One assigned book after another, all plodded through at a mind-numbing pace during my entire ninth grade year, allowed me to practice a new habit: pretending to read.
I spent the next four years bored, rereading (and growing weary of) books I had loved in middle school. I read with fascination only one book assigned to me in high school, Inner Tennis, required by my coach.
I was immature—of course I was. I deeply love Jane Austen’s sentences and humor now, but emerging from the disorder and mess of an alcoholic home was complicated. I wasn’t ready for Jane. I would have devoured Trash by Andy Mulligan which follows three boys who comb through refuse in the dump where they live in a third world country. To imagine a place so unlike my own would have expanded my vision while I practiced my skills as a reader and thinker. Even better if I read it in a book club with peers.
What I want us all to spend more time thinking about is the will and skill research, which discusses the bidirectional relationship between the will to persist with difficult reading and the skills that impede or accelerate progress. If reading is irresistible, a student will read more. And more matters. Shane, a low-skilled reader when I met him as an 11th grader, persisted for months with Moneyball because, as a lifelong baseball player he could lean into what he already knew to make sense of what he didn’t. He loved learning more and more about baseball. The effort it took to read complex sentences paid off in new understandings of the business behind the sport he loved.
I could tell you hundreds of stories like this. Yes, hundreds. High school could be about balancing assigned texts with attention to the individual reading lives of young people. It could be expanded with book clubs to unleash a wide range of possibilities across time and country for all students. It is about seeing adolescents as individuals and teaching into that challenge.
The misalignment of what we study in middle and high school English contributes to an aliterate student body: many know how to read but choose not to. And those who love classics in high school? They can discover the range of Austen by reading all six novels, deepening their understanding of Pride and Prejudice. If students choose what to read most of the time, and we support them as readers, we can shift pretending to read to a passion for reading in almost every teenager. This is not a fantasy; it is built on persistence. It is built on time, choice, and access.
My hope is that every student will discover books they love in every year of school. Imagine what is possible within that one vision.
You can find out more at booklovefoundation.org. Or join book-love-community.mn.co where teachers from 28 countries read, write, and think together.
Penny Kittle teaches writing at Plymouth State University. She taught in public schools for 34 years and learned two essential things: all students will build independent reading lives of joy, curiosity, and hunger when given agency; and teachers who write with their students generate community and creative power. Penny is the author of nine books, including Micro Mentor Texts, Book Love, and Write Beside Them, which won the James Britton award from NCTE. She co-authored two books with Kelly Gallagher: 4 Essential Studies and the best-selling 180 Days. She co-authored two books with Donald Graves. For six years she was a featured columnist for Voices from the Middle, an NCTE journal.Penny is the President of the Book Love Foundation where we believe a love of reading is built on engagement, equity, and the power of classroom teachers.
