The phrase "non essential book" caught my eye Mr. Peck. I admire your books greatly. I've read them to my students. My own children have read your books. I'm not a young naive teacher just starting out in the field. I'm a special education teacher in Fairfax, Virginia. I'm the mother of three wonderful, enjoyable, successful teenagers. They all read a mixture of books, some classics, some not so classic. I don't monitor their reading material. I'm just happy they read. I do know my 16 year old reads Maya Angelou because she doesn't like to read much and poetry is her media of choice. I like Maya Angelou and would consider her writing classic.

Even before I became a special education teacher I was very open minded about reading. I remember when I was in school I read lots of books and we had to do book reports. We had guidelines for the reports but that was okay. We just read the books, and did the report. No one bothered us while we read. Now, there's not so many book reports but we have the kids literally dissect the books. Chapter by chapter, character by character, scene by scene, word by word. I don't know if I would have liked reading as much as I do today if I'd had to do that to a book.

We do need to teach children how to read. It's not as innate an ability as we'd like to believe. Children, parents, and even some teachers would like to believe that once a child is a fluent word caller they are good readers. Of course, we know that word calling and comprehension are completely different. Children who read words can be completely unable to understand what they are reading.

Thank you Mr. Peck for providing us with some wonderful literature. I do hope you will try to realize why some of us consider all reading essential. Not all children have the ability to pick up novels and read. Let's just let the children read...that's a success.

I'd like to think that both essential and non-essential books have a place in the classroom. I agree that Hatchet is an excellent book and read it with my classes. While some teachers dislike the book and find it boring, I happen to like it very much, and so do the majority of my students. It definitely is a book that gets children to think, to question, to predict, etc. While I use books such as that to "teach reading", I use other books to teach students to "love reading". I think you need a combination of both. If my students don't love reading, it will not matter if I give them an essential book or not. They will not enjoy it.

My favorite author is James Patterson because of his writing style. I love the figurative language, the description, the sentence structure, the allusion. This year, I bought all of the Maximum Rise series for my classroom. I have to tell you that even my reluctant readers got hooked. The series is far from reality, but the students really connect with the characters in a fantasy sort of way. I just love that I am able to get them to read something that I consider excellent writing. After they read some of those books, they go on to realize that they do like to read and look for other books they may like.

As Bernice said, getting students to enjoy reading is a very important step in teaching reading. When I get students to change their view on reading, that to me is a success.