I have a million deadlines so I decided to write a blog post. Remember this blog? I have a blog. This is the blog.

Today’s topic is what I like to call key books. Key books are little Rosetta stones that open you up to new genres, the kind you thought were difficult to read or not to your taste. For example, I thought I didn’t like science fiction. Then in college, my buddy Brad forced a copy of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in my hands. Above my very loud protests, he insisted that I’d love it. I insisted that I wouldn’t. He won that bet. It was my key book into sci-fi. The majority of books I read are still horror or mystery but I’m open to sci-fi books as well. The same thing happened with fantasy novels. Many years ago, before a certain HBO show aired, Kate, who just happens to be Brad’s wife, was visiting me. When she discovered that I hadn’t read Game of Thrones, she literally made me drive to our local indie book store that minute and bought it for me. Again, I insisted that outside of King Arthur, sword and sorcery stuff just didn’t appeal to me. A snotty joke may have been made comparing the names of George R. R. Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien. I’m not embarrassed to say that I tore through the book in less than three days. Game of Thrones became my second key book. Fantasy no longer repels me, though I do lean towards grimdark. You can take the girl out of the book store’s horror section but you can’t take the book store’s horror section completely out of the girl.

Fast forward quite a few years. My older son, Thing1, loves to read. He’ll read anything he can get his hands on. Though he has favorite genres, he doesn’t discriminate. Books, magazines, you name it, he’ll read it.

Unfortunately, Thing2 only likes non-fiction. I’ve watched him take a fiction book, fan through the pages, then claim to have read it; but give him a Guinness Book of World’s Records and he’s in heaven. He’ll read and reread it for days, yelling out his favorite facts to you as he goes. The thing is, in an academic setting you can’t avoid fiction. There’s no way around it. (Full disclosure, he’ll read books like Big Nate or Diary of a Wimpy Kid but we’d really like him to try books without pictures.) His teachers in grades one and two were happy he read and didn’t push the issue too much. In third grade, his teacher tried to encourage fiction reading but Thing2 is stubborn. That teacher ultimately gave up as long as Thing2 did the assigned class readings. His teacher this year is a very clever woman. Not only has she found ways to curb some of his poorer habits that don’t result in meltdowns, she also found his key book.

Dave Barry is a famous writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Even I’ve read a handful of his books, mainly compilations of his newspaper columns. I did not know that he also wrote fiction. Children’s fiction to be more precise. Thing2’s teacher had one such book. Above Thing2’s loud protests (I have no idea where he gets this behavior from) she informed him that if he read 50 pages of Science Fair by Dave Barry and Ridley Pierson, and he didn’t like it, he could put it down and find something else. Not only did he read 50 pages, in the next two days he read the entire book. Then he asked to go to the public library, a place he usually won’t let me drag him to unless I allow him to check out CDs and video games. Once there, he made a bee line for the Dave Barry books and got The Worst Class Trip Ever. He read that one in less than a day!

We’ve still got a way to go in getting him to branch out but this is a huge step. Sometimes that first step is all you need. In summary, don’t turn your nose up at that genre that you think is trash or you definitely don’t like. There’s a key book out there for you.

*While writing this, a pattern’s emerged that perhaps Brad and Kate are my key people. I should look into that more.