The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

Author:Jim Trelease [Trelease, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101613863
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

In case you weren’t keeping score, that’s an eighty-word sentence, normally not a thirteen-year-old’s reading fare. But I was willing to wade through it to get the scoop on this guy Ben Hogan. That’s an important point. Personal interest can be a powerful driving force with boys, whether that interest is sports, auto repair, model racing, war, music, or computers. The window of opportunity through which you can reach his mind might only stay open a short while, so allow as much through it as the child is willing to consume.

I like to think of those SI writers as my early writing coaches. Most people are affected one way or another by the words and people they hang around with. Few people write doggerel after reading good literature. Granted, they may not write exactly like Dickens after reading him, but they certainly recognize the difference between him and junk. Exposure to great writing can only have a positive effect, especially if the writing is willingly absorbed.

The first time my own name appeared in print was in Sports Illustrated, November 28, 1955, when I was listed as a contributor to the U.S. Olympic team by purchasing a $10 membership card to make-believe Happy Knoll Country Club. For two years the magazine serialized a novel (Life at Happy Knoll) by the social critic and novelist J. P. Marquand, in which he satirically explored the machinations of the board members at a fictitious country club. Did this fourteen-year-old understand all the social commentary tucked into the series? No, but it gave me a good idea of how rich people maneuvered in their world and how decidedly different their secrets were from mine. You might call it “secret stuff” from the boardroom, and I gobbled it up.

Secret stuff is another driving force with boys (the stuff we think the grown-ups don’t want us to know), and it was on my mind one day in ninth grade when I picked up a copy of My Six Convicts: A Psychologist’s Three Years in Fort Leavenworth by Donald Powell Wilson. I’d stumbled on it in the adult section of the North Plainfield public library and the cover convinced me this was something really secret. I didn’t know a single psychologist or convict but I was willing to bet there was a ton of stuff in there I wasn’t supposed to know. Secret stuff.

A California professor, Jo Stanchfield, once told me that girls tend to be extrinsically motivated in their reading (favoring the choices of their peers, mom, and teacher), while boys are intrinsically motivated (favoring what they themselves are interested in). I agree. Call it selfish or pragmatic, but guys are drawn more to what interests them, not what interests the crowd. That certainly was the case with Convicts. And it was going to change my life.

The book was as revealing as I had hoped, and I used it as my first book report for my freshman English teacher, Mr. Alvin R. Schmidt. I can’t recall ever writing a book report in the years before this, although there must have been others.

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