Reply #52: I suspect you believe it's not a good argument because you're a long-time, committed reader, [View All]

[Heidi]

as am I. BUT, the argument _is_ a good one. I grew up in a family of serious readers, but my little sister by the age of 12 had shown NO interest in reading and had not once in her life read a book cover to cover for pleasure or enlightenment. So my parents gave up on trying to force my sister to read, and at about the same time, my sister discovered the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series of books and suddenly took to reading as though it were some great, undiscovered mystery that she had harnessed. I was reading adult biographies at 12, and our brother was reading science-oriented adult textbooks at that age; neither of us would have been caught dead reading Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. But those are the books that got my sister hooked on reading not just fiction, but newspapers and news magazines, and -- later -- adult fiction and non-fiction.

Different strokes, I guess.