The Interviews

James Patterson Talks to Rick Riordan
September 19th, 2008


JP: Hi Rick, welcome to ReadKiddoRead. Thanks for coming. You must be pretty busy right now.

Rick Riordan: Well, it’s a pleasure to be home for a little while and to get a chance to talk about reading. It’s a pretty cool thing to do.

JP: Now are you still touring with 39 Clues or is it over for a while?

Rick Riordan: That’s mostly over, though I have one more event tomorrow .

JP: Okay. But I do have one question from my son Jack. When is the next Percy?

Rick Riordan: May 5th.

JP: He’s pumped. It’s a little irritating to me, but I think you might be his favorite author.

Rick Riordan: That is high praise indeed.

JP: He did like Daniel X—he said with Daniel X, “Dad, you finally got it right.” But he loves Percy.

Rick Riordan: Well thank you!

JP: He really likes the Warriors, too.

Rick Riordan: Oh, yeah, both of my sons are really big into the Warriors—that makes me feel better because I can’t impress my sons either.

JP: They may just be trying to teach us a lesson. Now—I’m going to go ahead and ask a few questions—feel free to ignore them, or ask me questions.

Rick Riordan: Sure.

JP: Do you have any notions about how useful it is for parents to get involved with developing their kids’ reading habits?

Rick Riordan: I think it’s critical for parents to be involved in their children’s reading. I think one of the most important things that we can do as parents is model reading and be readers ourselves. A lot of times parents say, “Well, I don’t have time to read,” and then they are dismayed when their children aren’t readers. I think the first thing we have to do is make sure that our children see us reading books.

Past that, I think it’s really critical to give children a time to read at home, to build in a family reading time. It doesn’t matter what they’re reading, it could be magazines, it could be nonfiction, it could be fiction, whatever they like, as long as there’s a built-in time.

JP: We do that in our house. Do you know how prevalent it is in schools to have a built-in time—thirty minute school reads?

Rick Riordan: Well, it’s a trend that is becoming more common in the schools. A lot of schools call it D-E-A-R, the DEAR Program, for Drop Everything and Read. And I know it’s very successful in schools where I’ve taught.

JP: I love it. I think it’s great.

Rick Riordan: It’s fantastic because, again, it’s not so much about reading the canon of literature. It’s more about, “Hey, let’s grab a book; grab anything that you like and let’s just sit down and read as a community.”

JP: I think the other piece of it is trying to help kids find things that they might like. I mean, one of the issues I always have is the right selection—you walk in a big bookstore and people don’t know where to start. I mean, if you went to the Cineplex on a Friday night and there were 5,000 movies, you would just get back in the car.

Rick Riordan: Oh, absolutely. It’s a little mystifying to try to navigate your way through all the books that are out there. And it’s so important for kids to find the right book and what might be right for my ten-year old son might not be right for somebody’s thirteen-year old daughter.

JP: Right. I think sometimes people will say, “Well, gee, my son likes trains, therefore I’ll just buy a train book.” And you don’t really know what to look for—you’ve got to buy a good train book.

Rick Riordan: Absolutely. It has to be a train book that is accessibly written and really speaks to that particular kid and what they are interested in.

JP: You talked about a notion that kids want basically the same things that adults want: pacing, characters that you care about, humor, surprises, etc. Having been a teacher for a while, why don’t you think those kinds of books don’t show up on more required reading lists?

Rick Riordan: It’s interesting. I don’t know—I think maybe somewhere in the American psyche there’s this puritan idea that if reading is good for you it has to be boring. I don’t know why it is thought that reading has to be hard, or has to be difficult or not enjoyable in order to be educational. I don’t think that’s true.

JP: It has to be work. It has to have a message, a ‘work’ message.

Rick Riordan: I think there’s nothing wrong with having a message. But I think more importantly we have to remember that at its core, reading is about storytelling and it goes all the way back to Homer and telling the Greek myths aloud as an enjoyable activity. And so if it is not a good story then I think we’re missing the point. So why does that not happen in the books that we give kids? I think we do get caught up too much in the notion that reading has to be analyzed, and it has to be dissected for metaphor and dissected for theme.

JP: And especially when they are starting out. It seems to me that, obviously, learning to read can be very difficult; it certainly isn’t interesting. Then the first things, generally, that kids are given aren’t up to their level of imagination. And then if you start piling on more things that are unpleasant… We’ve evolved with Jack, so he’s a pretty good reader now, but the only book he read this summer that he didn’t care for was the one that was assigned from school. And a lot of the kids in his class felt the exact same way.

Rick Riordan: Absolutely. I had very similar experiences with my sons. They are reluctant readers and we’re working on them still and they’ve certainly made progress. But it’s not usually the books that are assigned to them that really light them on fire and get them interested in reading. And that’s a shame because there are some great, great books out there.

JP: Now do you go out and find books that you think will turn the boys on, your sons?

Rick Riordan: Absolutely. What I do is I read books with them. I look for books that have been recommended by other parents that have kids like mine. I talk to a lot of independent book sellers. I talk to a lot of librarians and from their recommendations I am usually able to cull a pretty good reading list for them. And not everything flies but I think the trick is to not say, “This book is required,” but to say, “Hey, here are fifteen books.” And ‘book talk’ with the kids, and say, “This one is about this and I really like this one and your friend will like this one,” and in doing that, typically, I may be able to at least zero in on a couple of titles that sound interesting.

JP: Did you employ some of that as much as you could in the classroom?

Rick Riordan: Oh, absolutely, yes—as much as I could within the curriculum and within the particular schools’ guidelines. I’ve always tried to give choices in what the kids were reading. Independent reading is sometimes difficult because it’s more free-form and teachers like everything be very structured. But as much as possible I would say, here are your choices, pick the one that appeals to you the most and have discussions in small groups and get back to me. And that tended to work much better than if I simply assigned the text that everyone had to read.

JP: Now with 39 Clues you have a multi-media, or multi-platform, approach, which is really interesting. Does that strike you as the future, or a part of the future in the reading experience?

Rick Riordan: I don’t know what will happen with that. I give Scholastic a lot of credit for being very bold and trying something new and we’ll see how it flies with the kids. I think the kids should be the final arbiters on what is good children’s literature. I think there is a lot of potential in the online components. Kids today are growing up with the internet and are very comfortable with that. When we described the 39 Clues project to people, the adults sometimes have a little problem wrapping their minds around it. The kids intuitively understand what we are trying to do. I don’t think the book, as the book, will ever go away. I certainly hope not! I think that the experience of actually having a book in your hands and reading is a wonderful thing. That will always be.

JP: Any notions for parents, teachers, or librarians, in terms of helping out kids who are very reluctant readers?

Rick Riordan: It depends so much on the individual kid. To be a good director, a good conductor, and getting kids into the right books, is about knowing the child and listening to the child and talking to them about their interests. Boys tend to like different things than girls do—often nonfiction works for reluctant readers. It’s sometimes a better doorway into reading than fiction is. Audio books can be a great tool for getting kids into reading, especially for those that might have learning differences where the actual act of reading is really tough.

JP: Is there much in audio?

Rick Riordan: There’s a surprising amount. It used to be the case where it was very difficult to find audio books for kids and I think we’re still behind on that but it’s getting a whole lot better than it was. And graphic novels, too, are another great way to get reluctant readers involved.

JP: Part of the idea of using graphic novels is getting that genre to broaden.

Rick Riordan: Oh, absolutely.

JP: It shows it’s a little nichey right now. I don’t mean the audience but in terms of a lot of the content—not all of it, but a lot of it.

Rick Riordan: It’s made leaps and bounds in the last five to ten years, I would say, but there’s still a long way to go before it’s both respected and broad enough to have a wide appeal.

JP: Is there anything else that comes to mind that might be helpful in this context? Going back to this idea that a lot of parents and grandparents don’t see it as their responsibility to really go out and find books that the kids are going to like. And then if they do, they don’t know where to start. When I go into the hardware store, I’m embarrassed to ask about what kind of nails to buy, and that’s the way lot of people are at bookstores.

Rick Riordan: Right. I guess, really, it boils down to having some good resource to help you locate books that kids will like. That’s one reason why this website is just a fantastic idea because we need more resources for teachers and librarians and parents to make sensible choices.

JP: Yes. We’re not saying that these are the only terrific books, but here’s a manageable number of terrific books. And giving enough of a write-up so that parents, teachers, or whoever will have a sense of the book.

Rick Riordan: You bet. Get some great titles on there that have been vetted by kids. That’s the best thing, when kids are recommending titles to other kids.

JP: Excellent. Alright, great luck with 39 Clues. The Patterson family is looking forward to the next Percy. I read 39 Clues over the weekend. I thought it was pretty cool.

Rick Riordan: Oh, thank you. Well, tell Jack hi for me and I hope he likes the book when it comes out.

JP: Okay.

Rick Riordan: Okay, it was great talking to you.

JP: Nice to talk to you. Thanks, Rick.

Rick Riordan: Okay, bye-bye.

JP: Bye.