From Publisher’s Weekly (May 23, 2011):
James Patterson, the bestselling author on Earth, doesn’t want to talk about writing today. He wants to talk about reading. For a man with scores of blockbuster books under his belt (it might be north of 70, but even the author isn’t sure how many he’s written at this point), Patterson is now fascinated with a new challenge: hooking kids on books. And his latest effort, “Read, Kiddo, Read,” aims to do just that.
“For most kids,” Patterson tells PW, “The best way to get them to read is to find books that are going to turn them on. Great Expectations is not where you start,” he says with a chuckle. “You may get there. But you want to give a kid a book that they’ll read, and go, ‘Give me another book!’ And if you get enough books under their belts, they have a positive opinion of books, and they become better readers—they just do it better.” In Patterson’s opinion, the same idea applies to film. He thinks kids benefit from having movies, and not just books, taught in the classroom. “You learn about characterization and structure, plot, and a lot of other things,” he says. “But if we started with Ingmar Bergman?”
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