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If we want to nurture lifelong readers and thinkers, to cultivate social responsibility, to make reading relevant to the 21st century, and to bring joy to reading, then the status quo will not suffice.

And simply reading a text doesn’t mean students are intellectually engaged. Much of their school reading is done with little thought. They read to get the assignment done as quickly as possible. Why do we perpetuate this school culture of fake reading when our world is filled with so many astonishing things to read?

One of the most disheartening things about the reading students do in school is that it is sopredictable. As students enter their classrooms each day, they al- ready know what they’ll be reading: another novel similar to the last novel, another story out of their lit- erature anthology, another chapter in the social stud- ies textbook, another five-paragraph essay. When they leave school at the end of the day, they know the texts they’ll be reading the following day and the fol- lowing year. How often are students genuinely and happily surprised by a new assigned reading?