It’s not only the grammar - it’s that they write things that they would never, ever say. Students never come to my office hours, but I wish they would so I could make them read their own writing out loud. Grammar can conceivably be taught, but no one can learn how not to say ridiculous things without reading.
I’m a reader, and a proud reader of what other people might call fluff.
I had my horse book phase and my romance phase and my ooh does it have sex in it? phase. I feel like I’ve gotten something from nearly all the books I’ve ever read. To me, reading isn’t the end, it’s the means.
I think the trick is not to say “Don’t read that- it’s garbage. Here. Read this, it’s good” but instead to say, “Oh, you like Encyclopedia Brown? Did you ever read this one? It’s about a detective…” and hand them something a bit more advanced/better written, and keep going, offering better and better books. Or, if they are the sort of people who thrive on “forbidden” stuff, tell them it’s too grown-up for them, and then turn a blind eye when they sneakily read it. 
I was lucky; we always had a lot of books around, and were encouraged to read. I still run into people (adults!! :eek:) who don’t read books at all, and subsist on a diet of gossip magazines. I also know someone who refers to the “original” Little Mermaid, but is really talking about a TV show or kids’ movie - she has never read the Hans Christian Anderson story, and will correct you if you try to tell her about it. I feel sorry for people like this; they are really missing out.
By all means, let them read the fluff, make better stuff available, and get them reading.
For some kids I think that “fluff” books (or comic books) can be the literary equivalent of gateway drugs, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
As a kid I read anything and everything (except something like Zane Grey), and that’s still true. As I get older I just have experienced a tilt towards non-fiction. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to buy and enjoy fluff books too.
By all means, read fluff. My one caveat is I would NOT let my kids read the Junie B. Jones books. Why? Because her spelling and grammar are atrocious and I thought 6 year olds should not be exposed to such twee crap.
But bring on the comic books, the graphic novels, the cereal boxes, the Babysitter Club, Encyclopedia Brown, Dragon, Frog and Toad, American Girl, Hardy Boys etc. My youngest is not a natural reader (like the older two were), and since he likes Garfield, Garfield it is (ugh). Anything, everything to get him to read. He has read the Perseus Jackson series and I count that as a great thing.
My mother never worried about us reading Richie Rich or Archie or Snoopy or The Bobbsey Twins etc. All 5 of us are voracious and constant readers. Practice works, especially when it’s not considered practice or work. Good readers have an easier time in school and on standardized tests etc (no cite, no time for one, sorry!).
I tend to read genre fiction (mostly murder mysteries, but I prefer British cozies to American violence), but about every 3 months I find I’ve had a surfeit of fic and go for Dawkins or Sacks or other nonfiction stuff. I almost never read “literature” because I find that not only are the books somewhat stuffy, the analysis and litcrit that surrounds these books is, too. Like Harper Lee, I never read forwards to books and IMO, if book needs a forward it has already lost half its readership. (that is to say, I don’t read books that I’m unfamiliar with that come with forwards–I read Austen, Bronte and Fitzgerald–but I skip the forwards).
I’d like to start reading historical biographies and think I’ll start with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln. I’ll probably follow that up with rereading Harry Potter. I’ll read just about anything.
Thanks for the link – that blog really IS hilarious. I was a little old for the Goosebumps craze but my younger sister loved them, and I know I read one of hers. It was about a couple of kids who went to a horror theme park that turned out to be run by actual monsters. Even with the linked blog’s help I’m still not sure which one that was though, since there were apparently like five with exactly that same premise.
ANYWAY, even though I’m not a Goosebumps expert that blog has had me literally LOL several times. 
After college I worked in the kids department of a store. I remember one Saturday morning right after one of the Harry Potter books came out, this boy who looked about 8 plopped himself down in the corner and just sat and read and didn’t budge for probably an hour while his mother shopped, and I remember thinking, “Go JK!”
As for myself, one of my earliest memories was walking with my mother to the library at least once a week. She definitely believed that reading something was better than reading nothing so she didn’t care if I read Beezus and Ramona, Peanuts comic books, or books about astronomy. In grade school I’d read ahead in our storybooks, sneak my older sister’s Cosmopolitans when I could, high school textbooks if something in it caught my eye, instruction manuals, cookbooks, comic books, craft books of any kind, and taught myself (mostly wrongly) about the Facts of Life from an old medical encyclopedia.
I’m still the same way now, and if I had kids I’d definitely let them read whatever they wanted (though I’d teach them myself about The Birds and The Bees instead of making them figure it out on their own.)
And I have to laugh about both the Redwall comment and Just Some Guy’s experience, because something similar happened to me. I read one of the early Redwall books on vacation because I was bored, and it was “how come I never heard about these before?” When I got home I ordered 4 or 5 more from Amazon, and went from “not bad at all” to “ok, who’s the heroic rodent this time?” to “how the hell did the builders know to put all these ever so subtle clues and hints about stuff hundreds of years in the future for their descendants to find purely by happenstance?” to “drinking game: do a shot whenever someone sings a sea chanty!”
WOW! Only book I have denied my kids is Junie B. Jones for EXACTLY the same reason!
Fight the good fight for grammar!