How to Get Teenage Boys to Read

The accepted wisdom of our day is that boys, though they may read voraciously in elementary and early middle school, often cease to read on their own or only read in a very disengaged way throughout middle and high school. Though there are many factors that cause this phenomenon, (home atmosphere, cultural expectations, etc.) I believe that one of the biggest reasons boys quit reading is that they aren’t finding anything to interest them. After enough poetry of the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes and books trying to get them to care about poor little boys like Pip, it may be good to balance their reading diet with something that may be more appealing to their appetite. My solution: plunk that boy down in front of The Song of Roland, or Beowulf, or The Iliad.

Imagine if high school boys encountered literature not like this:

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!”
(“The Chambered Nautilus”, by Holmes)

But like this:

“Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth with the pitiless
bronze, so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way clean through
below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered,
and the teeth were shaken out with the stroke and both eyes filled up
with blood, and gaping he blew a spray of blood through the nostrils
and through his mouth, and death in a dark mist closed in about him.”
(The Iliad, book 16)