Maybe your nephew is allergic to stories that abuse the adverb the way a low rent pimp abuses his $10 crack whore???
Try him on other stories. The love of reading, in my experience, is more likely to take hold of a child if he/she has been read too and encouraged to read since they were toddlers. If mom and dad are just starting now, they have a bit of an uphill battle and they mind as well back off and let him eventually find stories that interest him. Probably in High School, hopefully sooner. I say back off, because they don’t want to turn him off reading completely by forcing the activity on him.
My brother and I are both dyslexic. I loved reading and taught myself to compensate. He has always struggled to read because he preferred to be outside playing and doing stuff.
But then again, I spent a lot of time sick as a kid and really never got into extreme outside activity. I liked swimming, sailing and walking in the woods. He liked scrounging up a bunch of cousins and playing baseball or football.
When my son was nine he loved HP, too. Watched the movies, played the video games, dressed up and play acted with friends, etc. He also had no interested whatsoever in reading the books. All he wanted to read at that age wereDK Eyewitness Books. So that’s what I let him read. He learned so much about a lot of subjects. He just wasn’t into reading fiction.
Was it the 5th or 6th book? I’m an avid reader who enjoyed Harry Potter and I thought they dragged something terrible - I think she must have either got rid of her editor or the editor must have been too intimidated to edit properly…
Also, is he expected to read alone? He might enjoy it more reading with his parents/you/other people. I had good results with a reluctant reader by taking turns reading a page each. The child doesn’t need to concentrate for a long period and they get the interaction of another person enjoying and responding to the story.
If he strongly dislikes all reading (and not just HP) it may be due to eye problems that are worth looking into. Unfortunately, most eye docs do a shit job when it comes to anything beyond basic vision correction. See if you can find someone who uses some sort of electronic eye-tracking equipment (like a Visagraph). Some educational diagnosticians will do this.
It’s hard to read when you’re eyes don’t work together properly. This is easier to fix at a younger age, but at 9 it may not be too late.
The thing about only reading what he likes is that all through school he’ll be forced to read what he doesn’t like. He needs tips on how to read for comprehension when it comes to genres he doesn’t appreciate. My daughter wouldn’t have touched HP at nine. She was ALL about Shakespeare though (which I loathe and do not understand her affection). A few years later she would be more interested in non-fiction. But in her later teens she was all about HP and that damned Twilight saga.
I’ve noticed if something is assigned there usually is a bigger struggle. I homeschooled so I had to find the balance between reading for pleasure and the required reading. Not just literature either. World history was a breeze but she could barely make it through two pages when it came to American History or anything science related.
I was a voracious reader as a child, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I love fiction, but I also loved stuff like Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Guinness Book of World Records, and the Book of Lists, as Tequila mentioned. I also read several encyclopedias (Brittanica and World Book) from one end to the other.
Is 9 too young for the Horatio Hornblower series by C. S. Forester? I didn’t read those until I was in my late 20s, but would have loved them as a kid.
The Encyclopedia Brown stuff was fascinating, too.
What I really loved was knowing things other people didn’t. (Yes, I worked hard at being a know-it-all.) That was why I loved Ripley’s, Book of World Records, Book of Lists, and any other sources of what might be called “trivia”.
Expose the guy to a range of stuff.
My wife and older daughter are big readers, but my youngest daughter wasn’t really into it. In her mid-to-late teens, she discovered Stephen King, and I believe has read everything he has ever written.
Some people just aren’t enthused about reading. My spouse, for example, never reads for enjoyment because he doesn’t enjoy reading. For him, at best, it’s a tool. He’ll read technical stuff, including some very advanced stuff, but never a novel.
Your nephew needs to be able to read and comprehend age/class level appropriate material, even if he’s not particularly fast at it. So really, that would be my concern in your shoes: what’s his reading level, not his reading speed or reading quantity.
I reading a book right now that has me wondering if reading novels for pleasure will go the way of cursive writing (Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”). I’m just starting it, but he mentions that he and a a bunch of other smart, well-educated people find that they aren’t reading the same way that they used to. What used to be deep, linear reading is turning into gestalt, scattered reading for just the nuggets of information that you’re interested in or looking for.
It isn’t hard to imagine that kids raised on the internet, tv, and movies won’t have the same affinity for sitting and reading novels that those of us raised before computers have (or had - it sounds like we’re losing it, too). They don’t need to read novels - they just need to download the movie.
This is a really good point. My biggest breakthrough with my reluctant reader came when we got to a really crucial bit of the plot as our allotted reading time finished. She was very annoyed when I wouldn’t read the rest to her, so much so that she carried on reading voluntarily by herself (for possibly the first time ever in her life) because she HAD to know what happened next.
If he was taught to read with Whole Word, he may not be able to read. My wife started read those books with my nephew at the time the first movie came out. In doing so, she discovered that the school system had left him functionally illiterate. He could read a few hundred words that he had memorized, could guess at a few hundred more and would skip over anything else. As a result he hated to read. My wife taught him phonics and he just took off with reading.
My son is almost thirteen. He reads at above his grade level, but getting him to read (he has to read 1000 pages a trimester) is like pulling teeth. And always has been.
First question - is the HP book he is reading age appropriate. Granted all Dopers and most Doper kids could have read them all by four - but Harry Potter is actually kind of challenging for a lot of nine year olds.
Second question - are you concerned about his reading at grade level - what are his test scores like on reading and reading comprehension? Is this a “he can’t read well” or “he doesn’t enjoy reading.”
Third question - does he enjoy reading other material? My daughter reads fantasy extensively - and doesn’t like the HP books. My son barely reads fiction at all - and doesn’t like the HP books (he read one in the middle because it was almost 900 pages - then he just needed to read a slim 100 page book to meet his page quota).
As well as the point about “I already watched the movie, d’uh!”, I’ve told before the story of how He Who Would Not Read used to perceive books as the enemy (many times he’d come up to siblings or parents saying “I’m bored, entertain me” and we’d reply “I’m doing homework/cooking/reading, entertain yourself”) and how he could read just fine but never, ever read anything which was not a school assignment. Not even the blurbs on comics: he’d look at the pictures only and then say “I don’t understand why so-and-so did that” “did you read the blurbs?” “no!” “so-OOOOO!”
His first novel was The Hobbit, the summer he was 14; reading it was triggered by many times of being told, while playing pen’n’paper RPGs “I’m not telling you, you can read the freaking book”. Next went Neverending Story and LotR, both of which fall squarely into the “thick enough to count as blunt weapons, even as softcover” category. Two years latter, him and a friend used stone, paper, scissors to determine which one would lend The Hobbit to their Lit teacher, who hadn’t read it (or anything from the “Fantasy/SciFi” shelves, for that matter). He’s yet another one who’s more likely to have his nose in a political essay than a novel, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his reading.
I just realized if the LotR movies had existed back then, he might never have read those books… but yeah, you don’t get degrees in Business Management and Politics while being unable to read.
I wonder if the problem isn’t a hate of reading, but a love of computing. It may be worth limiting computer (and other screen) time to, say, an hour a day.
- but Harry Potter is actually kind of challenging for a lot of nine year olds.