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News Tue Aug 04 2009
Ray Bradbury Loves Graphic Novels
USA Today interviews Ray Bradbury about the upcoming publication of the graphic novel version of Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury says he can imagine "someone giving it to a 10-year-old kid who then wants to read the original novel. That's what good graphic novels can do. They can make you read more." He's not worried that kids will only look at the pictures because, from his own experience with illustrated novels, they only increase kids' desires for learning to read. Bradbury also commented on the idea of a new film version of the book, saying that the 1966 François Truffaut film downplayed one of the main characters (that being just one of the problems, in my opinion) and he'd love to see a new version with Sean Connery as Beatty and Nicolas Cage as Montag (ooh...don't know about that Nicolas Cage part, but this movie is definitely itching to be remade).
Dennis Fritz / August 4, 2009 4:35 PM
Bradbury is right on pint here.
If you want to encourage kids to become life-long readers, the very worst thing you can do is force them to read things they aren't interested in. The small minority of fourteen-year-olds who happen to be voracious readers may well take to Romeo and Juliet. However, the majority will not. For them, being forced to read Elizabethan drama will make them see reading as drudgery.
Also, within any given age group, kids' reading levels are all over the place. For many, graphic novels provide needed scaffolding to support their development of strong reading comprehension.