Patterson wants kids to share his love of reading

James Patterson didn’t plan to become a famous children’s author. He wasn’t even a big reader when he was a kid, despite having a teacher for a mom and a grandmother who was a librarian.
“I didn’t read as much as I should have,” he admits. “I read what I had to.”
It wasn’t until college, when he could read what he wanted, that he grew to love books.
“I just couldn’t get enough. And it got me scribbling,” he says. “I really liked scribbling. I like telling stories.” A glance at the “P” author shelf in any library proves it. Patterson has written more than 100 books, about a fourth of them for kids. His latest, “I Even Funnier: A Middle School Story,” came out Dec. 9.
Patterson’s interest in children’s books traces back to when his son, Jack, was 8. Like his dad, Jack was a good student but a so-so reader. That summer, Patterson and his wife made a deal with Jack: He could skip some chores if he agreed to read every day. “Aw, do I have to?” Patterson recalls Jack saying. Jack’s parents told him they would help find books he would really like. “By the end of the summer, Jack had read a dozen books, 10 of which he thought were terrific.”
Patterson loves telling this story when he appears at schools, as he did last month at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Washington. Every student there had been given one of his books beforehand, so the auditorium was buzzing when he got up to speak.
The great thing about reading, Patterson tells kids, is it’s fun right from the start.
“A beginning guitarist? That’s painful,” he says. “But as a reader, you can get cool stuff right away” and learn about different people and places.
He also stresses why reading matters. If you don’t read well, he says, “you’re going to be lost in high school. And what are you going to do in life? Be a pro athlete? A rapper?“
While that might sound good to some kids, the chances of it happening are slim. So that makes reading — and doing well in school — a big deal. “Reading will give you a lot of choices,” Patterson says.
“I like it when the author paints a picture,” says Ashley Harris, one of a trio of Stuart-Hobson students who spoke to KidsPost for this story.
Ashley, 12, read more than 30 books last summer, many of them at the breakfast or dinner table. “My mom tells me to ‘Stop reading. I’m trying to talk to you,’ ” the seventh-grader says. “But that’s my time to read.”
Nicholas Taylor tells a similar story.
“My mom says, ‘You’re always on the phone.’ But I’m reading on the phone,” said Nicholas, 11. He likes action books about cars, sports, hunting and bicycling. A teenage relative suggests books he might like. “I’ll go to the bookstore. If the cover jumps out at me, I’ll skim through it,” Nicholas says.
Ashley scans covers, too. Mostly she likes “realistic fiction — something that could happen.” She doesn’t mind if a book is depressing, because then “I see that my life isn’t so bad, because look at what these kids [in the book] go through.”
Sixth-grader Allison Branham, who might want to be a writer or librarian one day, says she “hung on to every word” that Patterson said. The 11-year-old was even able to recite a saying included in one of his books: “When the world says ‘Give up,’ hope whispers, ‘Try it one more time.’
“Sometimes I just give up,” says Allison, who has a condition called Asperger’s syndrome, which, in her words, “makes my brain think differently. I have my own world in my head. And all the books I read give me ideas on how to improve that world.”