READING TIPS AND NOTES / EXPERT ADVICE

All our work to get children reading by 9 will be for naught if they aren’t still reading at 19. Simply knowing how to read isn’t enough. Kids need to acquire the reading habit.

But making this happen in a culture where televisions are common fixtures in children’s bedrooms and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a more familiar character than Sara, Plain and Tall isn’t easy. Why should teenagers pick up Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” and Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm” when electronic games offer vicarious adventure galore? For anyone who would choose to read a newspaper education page, the answer is obvious. But to most young people it is not.

Many children who know how to read seldom do. As a result they never develop the fluency that allows them to read with ease. The act never becomes effortless. Think about it. Working your way down this column doesn’t feel like hard work. It feels like breathing. But children who are struggling to sound out words or make sense of the shape of a sentence find reading hard work.

Making the transition from knowing how to read to being able to read with ease takes practice. But if practicing resembles piano scales repeated to the beat of a metronome, only a dutiful few will ever become fluent readers. Practice needs to go hand in hand with pleasure--the special pleasure that only a good book can bring.

When I look for books to hook students who have yet to develop the reading habit, I try to find easy-to-read stories about hard-to-solve teenage problems. I also keep my eye out for the books that disappear from my classroom shelves. A few titles are impossible to hold onto. The Guinness Book of World Records, Name Your Baby, “Forever” by Judy Blume and whatever Michael Crichton book has most recently been made into a movie all have a shelf life of under three days.

All copies of books by Francesca Lia Block quickly vanish without a trace. My favorite is “Missing Angel Juan,” the story of a tangly-haired, purple-eyed teenager called Witch Baby who lives in L.A. and plays drums in a band called the Goat Guys. She also loves a boy named Angel Juan. When Angel leaves for New York, Witch Baby has to follow. Like Odysseus, she must venture into the unknown, face monsters beyond her ken and descend into the underworld, all in order to save Angel Juan. Regardless of their understanding of epic motifs (or lack thereof), teenagers resonate to this hero’s tale. Maybe it is because the hero wears Rollerblades.

In “Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.,” Luis Rodriguez describes his own coming of age in East L.A. This vivid memoir explores the lure of gang life and cautions against the violence that inevitably claims its participants. The text includes shockingly explicit passages (no doubt contributing to its popularity for teenage readers) but Rodriguez, himself a poet, uses these words to tell a shocking story.

What the disappearing books seem to have in common is that they portray young, contemporary protagonists caught up in a search for themselves. I like to think that it is not simply forgetfulness that causes my students to keep them but rather a reluctance to part with a book that has, maybe for the first time, brought pleasure.

BOOK EVENTS

* Tuesday in Los Angeles: Felipe de Neve Branch Library at 2820 W. 6th St. offers story time in Spanish for toddlers and preschoolers at 10:30 a.m. (213) 384-7676.

* Wednesday in La Verne: Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Book Shop, 1030 Bonita Ave., offers a signing and reading by Barney Saltzberg, author of the California Reader Award-nominated “Mrs. Morgan’s Lawn” at 10 a.m. (909) 599-4558.

* Saturday in El Monte: Fiesta of Books at the El Monte Community Center, Grace T. Black Auditorium, 3130 Tyler Ave., features an 8,000-book giveaway, storytelling and crafts projects for El Monte and South El Monte kindergartners through sixth graders from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (626)453-3777.