Book contents
3 - Adolescence: The Reader as Thinker
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
Summary
Chris is fifteen, a high school sophomore, slight, dark-haired. He is slouched in a chair, his eyes alert and suspicious. We are talking about books he has read and some particular stories and an essay I have asked him to look at. Here are some of the things he says, in a slightly abridged form.
I never read much when I was, say, ten or eleven. I knew kids that read, but they didn't read novels; they just read the Hardy Boys or whatever. I never read those books. I really didn't like reading. I never really tried reading, actually. It was a labor to pick up a book. I never could sit still long enough to read. Then all of a sudden… I don't know. I read a book that I liked and one thing led to another. I just kept reading.
When was this?
In the seventh or eighth grade. We read The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton, and that was one of those books that has a lot action, and I thought it was a pretty good book. It gave me a lot of information about New York streets [the story is actually set in a nameless city “in the Southwest”], a lot of information to think, about. And so I just picked up other books like that.
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- Becoming a ReaderThe Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood, pp. 94 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991