>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Background noise ]
>> Thank you, and we are now moving on to the next segment
of our program, and we've had a wonderful afternoon so far
and I promise you, you will not be disappointed.
So it's really my pleasure to introduce our second guest speaker,
James Patterson, and there are any number of ways to describe him,
phenomenal collaborator, communicator, person who can talk
to any generation and has been translated into myriad languages,
and people think that he is a native son.
He's a consummate philanthropist and he is to sort of take a sort
of variation on some of his books, he's a serial careerist.
So as many of you know, he had phenomenally successful career
in advertising with a major advertising agency,
and then was writing at the same time,
and moved over into more full-time writing.
He has sold more than almost 300 million books worldwide.
It is estimate that 25%
of all hardcover suspense/thriller novels sold
in the last three years were written by James Patterson,
and he holds a Guinness record
for the number 1 New York Times bestsellers.
And so for an entity like the Library of Congress,
which is always bragging about being the first and the best
and the largest and the most,
James Patterson gives this institution quite a run
for its money.
He's also moved as many of you know for quite awhile now,
across the generations, and is the best-selling author,
not only for adults, but young adults and middle school students,
and they are absolutely enthralled by him, as we are as adults.
James Patterson has devoted an incredible amount of time
to championing books and reading,
and he is serving right now just recently appointed as a champion
as the Library of Congress Young Reader's Center,
and we are delighted to be able to have him as one of our team members,
because this is a phenomenal relationship
for the Library of Congress.
He has been a presenter at our Book Festival twice,
and on the philanthropic side, I think many of you know
about ReadKiddoRead, which is a website for younger readers designed
to help parents, teachers, librarians, the entire community,
get the next generation excited about reading.
And these are mediated books, carefully chosen books,
that help students, young children want to read.
James Patterson has also made regular donations of hundreds
of thousands of dollars and books to school in the U.S.
and to our troops overseas, and he personally funded an ad campaign
to get people interested in reading and to sort of shape the tree.
In addition to his writing career, he also works with Dwayne Wade,
the basketball star, and does a webcast for educators,
kids and librarians called OneonOne, and Dwayne and James together,
try to inspire more reading.
So finally, James Patterson has taken a great interest
in independent booksellers and has given them grants to help get people
into their doors and to maintain the critical role
that independent booksellers have in the life of the mind of America.
So it's absolutely a pleasure to introduce I think the only man
who gives Thomas Jefferson a run for the money in this building,
and that's James Patterson.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]
>> James Patterson: Hi, I'm Stephen King.
I am here today, and I mean it quite seriously, to help save lives,
and I think all of you have that as one of your goals as well.
And these are lives of children all across our country,
and I take it very seriously.
And even more than you are, I'd
like to turn everybody here this afternoon into even more
of a reader missionary,
because better readers become better thinkers,
and because if kids aren't competent readers, their chances of getting
through high school are slim and none.
And I was at a very good Stuart Hobson Middle School today,
and I talked about that with the kids, and it's a good school,
it's a very good school, and those kids are on their way,
and they know that they're lucky to be there,
because they're really getting a good foundation in reading and math.
But for a lot of kids, this isn't the situation,
because if they don't learn -- and I'm not talking about being readers
for life; I'm talking about being competent readers.
If they don't become competent readers,
high school just becomes hopeless for them.
How are you supposed to do science and history and English
if you really struggle every time you try to read a sentence?
And these same people, their chances
in life afterward are really not good, either.
Where is my lovely Sue, bride, somewhere in here.
There she is.
He's now 15, and interesting guy.
When he was 5, Jack wrote his first novel,
Death of the Butterfly Catcher, wrote and illustrated.
And Butterfly Catcher travels halfway around the world trying
to catch the butterfly on a boat, doesn't catch him,
gets on an airplane, travels more of the world,
doesn't catch the butterfly, gets on a train, catches the butterfly,
train stops, he gets off the train,
he gets hit by a train going the other way,
Death of the Butterfly Catcher, butterfly flies away.
The kid's got it.
But Jack was -- he's a bright guy --
he wasn't a big reader when he was younger, and when he was 8,
Sue and I decreed -- as only parents can do, good parents,
we can decree stuff, that Jack had
to read every day -- cruel, I know, inhuman.
He did not have to mow the lawn,
but he had to read 45 minutes an hour every day.
And he said, "Do I have to?"
And we said, "Yeah, unless you want to live in the garage."
And we said, the good news is we're going to go out and we're going
to find some cool books for you.
We're going to get books that you're going to like.
And that's really the important thing,
and we understood that it was our job.
So we did research and looked around a lot, and then we went out
and found books like one of the Percy Jacksons and a book
from the Warrior series and a Wrinkle in Teim
and Al Capone Does My Shirts and one
of my Maximum Ride books, and a dozen or so books.
And by the end of the summer, Jack,
his reading skills had improved dramatically and he read
about ten books that he loved, which was so cool,
because there are millions of kids in this country
who have never read one book that they like.
Even in this school where I was, several of the kids --
and fortunately for me, I really enjoyed this --
they had to read a lot of my books before I came
and they really liked them, and that was a surprise for them,
that they were reading a novel
for the first time and actually liking it.
And we have a thing, when Jack asked us about this, why we were decreeing
and doing this stuff to him, and we said, we read in our house.
We read in our house.
I made this bumper sticker in a lot
of the independent bookstores, We Read In Our House.
It's so simple, even better than Our Son is An Honor Student.
We Read in Our House.
That is a cool thing to say.
That is a good thing to up up on the refrigerator.
And it's really important that kids see that.
Now, in Jack's case, he went from really not reading that much
to when he took his SSATs he got an 800 in reading.
So there's the one piece of it where we can take kids
and really make them superb readers, but as I said, even more important
to me are these kids who aren't competent readers.
And we can do stuff with them.
We can win them over.
There is hope there.
And the nice thing about books -- you want to play the guitar
and it's binig bung, gung, gung, it's really painful and awful
and terrible until you get quite good at it, but with books,
you can kind of struggle through
and you can read the equivalent of a Chuck Barry song.
It might take you a little longer, but right from the beginning,
you can read some pretty good books.
And reading doesn't have to be and it shouldn't be work.
It shouldn't be work.
Reading can be fun, reading should be fun.
It drives me crazy sometimes when I'll see
in newspapers, guilty pleasure.
Why should reading a book be guilty pleasure?
What a stupid thing to say.
Smart people really say stupid things sometimes.
That should never be -- listening to rock and roll,
maybe that's a guilty pleasure, but reading a book?
No, that's not a guilty pleasure, that's a good thing.
And simple thing with kids, the more they read,
the better they get at it.
I will go to school sometimes and talk,
and I'll say, who likes soccer?
Yeah, we love soccer, okay.
Well, you better now or three years ago.
Better now.
Why? Well, we play a lot.
Okay, there you go, it's the same thing.
You got better at soccer by playing a lot.
You get better at reading by reading a lot.
Scary fact, there are several million kids in this country
who have never read one book that they love.
Scarier fact, in some states now,
government officials plan prison construction based on third
and fourth grade reading levels.
That's about the saddest thing that I've read in a couple of years.
It should be talked about here in Congress in my opinion,
it should be in speeches given right at the very top.
Our kids need to be able to read, and it's doable.
As individuals, I cannot and you cannot deal
with the global warming thing really,
as an individual I can't solve that,
whatever you think about global warming.
And I can't as an individual,
most of us cannot really affect healthcare,
but we can affect reading.
We can affect it in our houses for sure.
I have parents -- and this happens all the time,
thousands and thousands of times.
People come up to me and go, you got my children reading?
And a lot of times with tears in their eyes,
because if their kids aren't reading, that is a really big deal.
That is a major concern for a log of parents.
And it really worries the heck out of them,
and if you get their kids reading, they're so emotional.
On the other hand I'll have parents come up, and they'll go,
I can't get my kid reading.
I just go, do you get them to the dinner table?
Seriously, we read in our house.
Yeah, that's the deal.
And parents just need to be willing to say that, yeah, we do that.
And whatever -- people have their own way of how you get people
to do things, but no screens until you read --
there are a lot of ways to get at that,
and that parents have to figure it out.
And it's so essential, because there is nowhere, not in TV,
not in the movies, not in newspapers, where kids can meet
so many different kinds of people and learn the different stories
of these people and begin to understand who they are and accept
who they are as they can in books.
That's how important books are.
Nothing else has evolved the way books have evolved --
not TV, not the movies.
We can find out not just facts, but we can learn about people,
we can understand people, and in this day
and age it's more important than ever.
Anybody out there see the movie Gravity?
Okay. Calling all senators and congressmen and women,
turn your engines back on, folks.
Come on back to Earth.
We have things to accomplish here.
We got a lot of teachers out here who know they can do great work.
They know it, they want to, they have the passion
if they can get some help instead of people getting in the way.
That's all, help, help, help.
Insofar as I can help, I'll be here.
I'll do it.
I'm proactive.
I like to do stuff.
We're talking now, but I'm a doer.
Tell you a few stories.
My so-called writing career, such as it is,
began at a mental hospital outside Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I was working my way through college, honest.
I was an aid.
James Taylor was a patient there,
so was his brother Liv and his sister Kate.
You talk about dysfunctional families.
But it was great, because he used to -- he was not a hit singer yet
but he had -- in fact, he wrote a -- Fire and Ice he wrote a little bit
about the place and a girl he met there, and he had a lot
of those songs written while he was still at this hospital.
Robert Lowell used to check in regularly --
sad for him but happy for me, because I get to go talk to him.
Who gets to talk to Robert Lowell?
Come on, in Jim, okay, I'll sit down.
Tell me about what happens in this.
Oh, sure, I'll tell you.
And there was a great story just about every day when I was there.
I remember one time there was this patient who I'll call JC,
and I got to the nurse's station, and the nurse was a good friend
of mine, and they were putting plexiglass windows
up in the nurse's station.
It had been regular windows.
I said, what the heck is going on here?
And she pointed down the hall, and there was this JC guy and he was
on double specials, which meant you had to have an aid on either side
of him and within arm's length, because he had tried
to kill himself a few times.
And while we're sitting there talking, he just takes off
down the hall, the aids are chasing him, he gets about 6 or 7 feet
to this nurse's station, boom, head first right into the now plexiglass.
He had gone through it like 3 or 4 times in the last week.
And he went out for a couple of seconds, and then he come up,
he said, when the hell did they put those in there?
And I following many, many incidents like that,
I started writing stories, and I must have written
about 100,000 stories in those days but I got the bug, I got the bug.
Somebody said that you're lucky if you find something you like to do
in life, which is true, and then it's a miracle
if somebody will actually pay you to do it, which is doubly true,
and that's sort of my deal.
My first somewhat unconstructive criticism happened
when I was an undergraduate and I was told, you write okay,
but stay away from fiction, which was probably good advice.
So of course, I immediately wrote a novel.
Thirty-one publishers turned it down, some with extreme prejudice.
But the good part was that the book was finally published
and then it won an Edgar as the Best First Mystery of the Year.
And I keep a file with the names of the editors
who rejected my manuscripts.
Sometimes they send me books for blurbs,
and I'm nicer than they were.
I was 26 years old at the time; life was good.
My first best-seller came 15 years later, and so it took awhile.
I remember going into a Barnes & Noble in New York on Broadway
when this book first came out, and what we'll do, some of us --
Bill Dochie does this, too --
is we'll go and we'll go count the books,
used to be 14, oh, there's 11 now.
Looks like it's selling.
And what had happened with this book is it was
on the Times bestseller list and I didn't believe it.
So I'm in this Barnes & Noble and I look
at the pile and the pile is down.
I said, this is good.
Maybe the Times is actually accurate for once -- just kidding --
and then while I'm there, a woman picked up the book,
and she's looking, reading the fly leaf
and checking the page number and whatever.
Now, if we're in the store and we see you pick
up our book, we're watching.
If you buy it, it makes our day, no matter what else happens.
If you put it down, it breaks our hearts.
So I'm watching this woman and I'm still thinking
about whether the Times list is correct or not.
She puts it under her thing and she walks down the aisle.
I'm -- this is the best day of my life.
I just saw somebody buy one of my books, first time,
I've never seen it before.
She gets about halfway down the aisle,
she slides it into her pocketbook.
She stole the book, I couldn't believe it.
And all I'm thinking is, does that count as a sale?
The next year, I went on one of these drive-by signings,
which is when you show up at a bookstore.
They know you're coming, but there's not regular,
there's just bookstore people and you got to sign some books.
So I get to the store and there's about three people
from the bookstore, and they're, oh, Mr. Patterson,
you're one of our favorites, and we're slapping low fives
and slapping high fives, and this is the jolliest thing and they said,
we got several hundred of your books in the back there for you to sign.
I get to the back and they got these long tables,
filled with Richard North Patterson novels.
So I signed them.
Hollywood called soon after that and I made the mistake of answering.
They had these press junkets in Hollywood where --
this is really weird -- Son of Chucky V, whatever,
and they will fill a theater with journalists who are going
to review Son of Chucky V. I don't know why.
Every newspaper in the country will have a review of Son
of Chucky V. Makes no sense to me.
So they had this press junket for Along Came a Spider,
and Paramount said, well, geez,
they're going to ask him what he thinks of the movie,
so we better let Jim see the film made from his book.
So I'm watching this movie and I watch the first scene, I go,
all right, well, that wasn't in the book.
And I watch the second scene, I go,
well that wasn't in the book, either.
And in the second scene Morgan Freeman is building a ship
in a bottle.
I'm going, that doesn't seem that cinematic to me, but whatever,
and then this woman comes in and she basically says,
enough with the ships in the bottle, why don't you go out there
and get shot at because it's supposed to be an adventure movie.
And I'm going, who the heck is this woman?
I wrote the book, it's not Nana Mama,
I don't know who the heck she is.
She never comes back in the movie.
So I see Morgan Freeman a little later in the press junket and I go,
Morgan, who is the woman in the second scene in the movie?
He says, oh, that's Alex Cross's sister.
I said, oh, I didn't know Alex had a sister.
Yeah. Sue and I -- actually this was in Washington.
We were on the set of Along Came a Spider, they were shooting --
if you get the chance and you probably will in Washington,
get the chance to get on the set of a movie,
do not go, unbelievably boring.
But that night we went out to dinner with Morgan Freeman
and the late David Brad, et cetera, and one of the actresses.
If you get the chance to do that, do it, that's fun.
So we're at a little Italian restaurant in town, and we get done
with the meal and up comes Fred Thompson,
Senator Fred Thompson and Clint Eastwood.
And so everybody in the little restaurant is staring,
because Morgan and Fred Thompson and Clint Eastwood are all over 6'3"
so they're all looking, whatever.
And this guy comes up for an autograph, my autograph.
And Clint Eastwood looks at the guy and he says, I need a hit movie bad.
Last Hollywood story, I was a character in the Simpsons.
I was a cartoon.
I'm still a cartoon.
And in this scene, Marge is on the beach and she's reading one
of my books and she says, "Oh, I just love James Patterson."
And all of a sudden I'm on a white horse and I'm riding behind her
on the beach and then they cut and she's on the back behind me,
and we're getting kind of friendly.
And she says, "James, why don't we make
up some nursery rhyme titles for some of your books?"
And I go, "There might be something we can do
that would be more fun than that, Marge."
And then this bell rings, brr, my eyes go like crazy,
and then it's Marge's bedroom and the next morning and Homer walks in.
He goes, "Marge, that was great last night,
but why did you keep calling me James?"
Got to be clean, it's the Simpsons, right.
Okay. I write lots and lots of young adult and middle school books,
the Maximum Ride series, Witch and Wizard Series, Middle School:
the Worst Years of My Life, iFunny, Treasure Hunters,
and I'm really trying -- as I say, I'm a doer.
I try to get stuff done.
I believe that the books that I'm writing are the sort
that kids will read and say "Give me another book."
And that's pretty much what happens.
There's always something going on in these books
that I think are worthwhile, beyond the fact that I think
that most of them are humorous.
Maximum Ride and Treasure Hunters are --
and this is something that the teachers will talk about --
they're really about kids taking responsibility for their actions.
In Maximum Ride if these kids don't take responsibility
for one another they will not survive to the next chapter.
In Treasure Hunters, these kids are left alone on a boat,
their parents have been treasure hunters,
for real treasures, which is kind of fun.
They go all over the world, there's a lot of geography and history
in the books, and they decide they're going to take
over the family business.
They don't really have a choice, but they have to take responsibility
for their lives, which is very cool.
It's a cool thing for kids to read about
and think about, and talk about.
iFunny is about a kid who at a very early age, decides what he wants
to be, which is kind of neat.
He has a real passion for it.
He wants to be a comedian, and the great thing for kids is and for them
to understand is for him to do that,
he's got to do something, he's got to study.
So he studies every comedian he can find, what they say, every joke.
He starts writing his own jokes.
He studies, he wants something, he's going after it.
And he talks right in the first chapter about wanting
to be a stand-up comedian, and then in the second chapter, he says,
I can never be a stand-up comedian because he's in a wheelchair.
And that's the second important part of that book,
because it's about the power of humor
to get us past some very tough things in life.
And I think once again, a lot of people don't take humor in books
as seriously as they ought to.
The Don Quixotes and Gunther Grass --
there's a lot of books that are written that are really, really,
really important and they don't get taken seriously
because they're funny, but I think a lot of times they say more
about the human condition than other books.
And I think if there isn't human in them,
then there's probably something wrong with them.
There's something wrong there,
because there should be humor in life.
So anyway, I write all these books for kids, and I was nominated
for author of the year at the Childcare's Choice Awards,
which was very, very cool.
And Jack said -- I told him I'd been nominated and he said, "Dad,
don't get me wrong, I like your books, but Rick Rydon is going
to win or Percy Jackson."
I said, all right, we're going to go to the Awards ceremony anyway,
so we went up to New York and I won.
It was great, and I got up to the podium
and I said - I squealed on Jack.
I said, Jack said that Rick Rydon was going to win.
But then I held up the award and I said, "This is for you, Jack."
And I knew Jack for the rest of his life would always remember coming
up to New York with his mom and dad, and his dad holding up his thing
and saying "This is for you, Jack," and it was for him
because he's the one that got me going with the kid's books,
he and his knuckle-headed friends, who are all bright kids.
That's the one thing about this reluctant reader thing,
it gets thrown around a lot.
It's not just kids in the bottom quarter, it's the top.
Jack is at Hodgekiss.
Jack's friends are at Andover and Ex- they're not big readers.
They read what they have to for class,
but they're not big readers, most of them.
They're reluctant readers.
They're bright kids who are reluctant readers.
Just to get a little bit more serious now, there's something
that parents need to understand if we're going to begin to turn
around this reading problem in Washington and in the country,
and maybe it's something that we can do here a little bit more
than we do.
But it's to get parents and grandparents
to understand, and a lot of them don't.
If you do, good for you, but a lot of parents don't,
that it's their job, not the school's job,
to find books to get their kids reading and then
to make sure that the kids read them.
It's their kids.
They screwed the pooch.
They've got to step up to the task there,
and they need to understand how important it is.
Parents would never knowingly send their kids out into the world
with a handicap, but that's what they're doing
if they don't get their kids reading, they're sending their kids
out with a handicap, and it's as important as getting them
to the dinner table, maybe even more important.
And given the fact that with a lot of kids, they don't have to go
to the dinner table so much.
And quite possibly, the best way, certainly one of the best ways
to get kids reading is to give them books that they're going
to gobble up, and that's why I have the site ReadKiddoread.com.
You want to give them books that when they read it, they say,
"give me another book or "let me go find another book,"
and to some extent it's that simple.
1 plus 1 equals 2, just does, that's the deal.
And freedom of choice is one of the keys
to getting kids motivated and excited.
VampireSagus, fine, comics, fine, Manga, fine,
books of sports statistics, okay, as long as they're reading,
especially early on, elementary and middle school.
Should they read on e- tablets?
Sure, if the families can afford them, absolutely.
How about re-reading a book?
Definitely, because what's going to happen when they re-read?
They're going to see stuff they missed and they're going
to be better readers because they realized that they missed stuff,
and that's why as they get deeper into college what is it --
what a lot of it is about is being deeper readers,
picking up the stuff you missed, having insights that you didn't have
when you read the book initially.
Don't ever tell a kid a book is too hard or too easy.
Great expectations?
Absolutely.
Finnegan's Wake?
Well, maybe not.
Now, some schools and school systems are on top of the reading problem
but not all schools obviously.
Some are quite successful, which is very cool.
Recently -- a couple of years ago anyway -- in Houston, Texas,
they turned around the 20 or so worst schools in the city,
and they turned them completely around, hopeless situation,
and they went from 2% of the kids being
at the proper reading levels to almost 100%.
And these were schools that were about to be shuttered,
but they were willing to change
and they did really tough stuff, really tough stuff.
What did they do?
They did the unthinkable.
They fired all the principals, they fired 70% of the staff,
they got the money to pay off the people that had been fired,
they brought in new teachers, they brought in tutors,
they made a longer school day, they made a shorter holiday.
They did really tough stuff, and it worked.
Now, I'm not saying that's the only way to do things,
but if you want change you have to be willing to change,
you have to do things and if it's a tough situation like that
where you're going to shut down these schools,
obviously something extreme needed to be done, radical stuff.
Miracles can happen, they do happen,
but they don't happen by accident usually.
It's usually someone was willing to change.
That's why I'm here.
I grew up in Newburgh, New York,
currently the murder capital of New York State.
I'm so proud.
My father grew up in the Newburgh Poorhouse,
his mother was a charwoman, which meant she cleaned up the bathrooms
and whatever, and for that duty she and my father got a room to live in.
I'm here. I'm here.
Miracles happen.
You do stuff, you do what you have to do.
There are models for success with reluctant readers all
over the place, but a lot of school systems,
a lot of state governments, they're not listening.
They are not willing to set aside they're not invented --
I mean, it's crazy.
There are ways to fix a lot of these problems, but people --
this thing, not invented here, who cares?
And this thing, oh, it won't work in our state,
of course it'll work in your state.
Or, there are more important things in education.
Not much, not much.
I don't know if anything is really, but it's certainly right up there.
Or a certain Ph.D said I know more about this situation than all
of you teachers do, even though I've never taught.
I don't know, maybe, maybe not, probably not.
KIPP Schools here, a very powerful --
they require kids to read at least 20 books a year
and to carry books around with them.
Hooray for the Kipper, really, great, it's terrific,
and within reason it works very well.
Sun Prairie Public Schools in Wisconsin stopped buying textbooks
and used the money to buy childcare's trade books.
Reading skills improved dramatically because the kids wanted to read.
What a surprise, what a shocker.
I love this one.
Texas school librarian has a club for 4th
and 5th grade boys called The Bubbas and they read such books
such as Disgusting and We Ate It.
Okay, fine.
And the Bubbas are reading and the Bubbas will go out of there
as readers, and that's the first step.
That's the first step.
If we taught movies in school, it wouldn't be a bad thing,
because we could learn about character and a lot of things
from some movies, but if you started with Ingmar Bergman movies,
we'd all go, oh, I don't like movies.
That's what we're doing to some extent with English.
A lot of kids, oh, I don't like English, because too much
of the stuff that they're reading they can't relate to it,
there's probably too much grammar, probably too much.
Grammar's important but maybe not that every kid has
to be an English teacher when they grow up.
Boys. Teachers need to understand that boys can be squirrely
when it comes to reading and in school and in general,
but what's squirrely about them --
there's a terrific book about this -- what's it called Raising Kane --
that gets into this whole issue --
boys need to be praised and encouraged more.
They cannot feel bad about themselves.
That's one of the things that happened.
You move, you're too squirmy, you're a bad boy --
it's not good, not a good thing.
They need to feel all squishy inside
when they're reading graphic novels or comics, it's okay.
General information tomes, great, terrific.
Guysread.com has categories such as robots
[ Background noise ]
how to build stuff, outer space but with aliens.
These are section areas -- at least one explosion --
that's actually a section.
Whatever. In a lot of schools there's a tendency not
to reward boys for reading books, like the Guinness World Records
or Sports Illustrated Almanac, or the Rolling Stone Illustrated,
History of Rock and Roll.
Too often boy-appealing books are disproportionately overlooked
on schools' recommended reading lists.
It's a big mistake and a very avoidable mistake.
A lot of this is about attitude.
If the school library isn't a boy magnet, the school needs
to check its attitude, maybe.
School libraries, another problem, obviously.
We are shutting them down.
We're getting rid of librarians.
Thai is not good, this is bad.
It's a terrible thing.
How do we fix that?
I don't know.
We'll have to talk about that.
The important thing here, and I believe this with my heart and soul,
is that we get kids reading.
That's the whole thing.
I think that's what we're going to talk about with the Center.
That is why I'm writing childcare's books.
It's why I started ReadkiddoRead.com.
And I was saying to somebody earlier, I'm talking to you now,
we have to stop talking, we have to act.
So I act. I'm giving a million dollars to independent book stores
because we're in this weird period now.
We're making a big transition in e-books, hand it's happening,
it's going to happen more, but as we make the transition, people have got
to have places to go to talk about books, and there have
to be people there, and maybe that can happen on the Internet
at some point, but it's not happening yet.
We need independent book stores.
Hopefully we'll always need them, but we definitely need them now.
So I'm not talking about it, I'm doing what I can do.
We've donated Little Brown and myself,
we've donated half a million books to school.
One year we did 250,000 for troops overseas.
ReadkiddoRead we've talked about, which is useful.
Sue and I fund 400 scholarships for college students who plan
to be teachers, which is a lot of scholarships,
probably more than General Motors does.
We're at 22 universities -- Michigan State, Vanderbilt, Manhattan,
Talison, Morgan State around here, Howard, Arkansas, San Francisco.
As I said, I'm here to help if I can save kids' lives.
I try to remember that every day.
I remember it anytime I get frustrated with what's going on.
I'll tell you one quick story and then we'll do Q&A if you want to.
This was out in San Francisco,
and what had happened was a humpback whale became entangled in a lot
of crab traps and lines, and literally hundreds of pounds
of traps and lines by the time this poor whale,
it just kept getting worse and worse.
And they brought rescuers out, and they decided the only way
to save the whale was to literally dive in and untangle it.
And these workers, these volunteers, worked for nearly half a day
and they had these little curved knives and just getting this whale
out if they could, and eventually they did free the whale.
And when they freed the whale, the whale did not swim
out to sea immediately, the whale swam around the rescuers
in these kind of joyous circles, and then the whale came back
to almost every single worker and nudged them and pushed then gently,
presumably in the whale's way of thanking them.
The whale knew that the whale had been rescued.
And the rescuers almost to a person said it was the most incredibly
beautiful experience of their lives,
and many of these rescuers said they will never be the same
after that experience.
That's what we're up to.
We're the ones freeing the whales, only in this case, it's these kids,
and when it works, when we save these kids,
when a teacher saves a kid, it's the greatest feeling in the world
and we'll never forget it.
Okay, thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Now you can see why I'm eager to take James Patterson
to see the Young Reader's Center which we're going to do at 4:30
which he's generously supporting, and we're also going
to meet Mr. Baldacci who is another speaker of ours
and who also is writing for young readers.
At 4:30 also another thing is taking place, and this I want
to remind our visitors from Singapore, and other places.
We're doing tours of the Great hall of the Library of Congress,
and this is a chance to have a tour with a guide, one of our docents,
to get a chance to look at this wonderful building and to see how it
by itself is a tribute to the book, because if you look up
and see the iconography you'll see names of authors,
the building opened in 1897 before all
that audio/visual material came out, and it was built
as a temple to books and readings.
However, in the next 10 minutes you have a question or two
for Mr. Patterson, maybe some of our board members who I can hear nodding
and agreeing, and maybe wanting
to ask him a question, this is your chance.
Any takers?
[ Background noise ]
>> Yes, Mr. Patterson, Gwendolyn Beck.
And I've worked with some children after school teaching them
and helping them with their homework,
and many of the children come that have parents
that do not speak English.
And some of the books that you've mentioned, I apologize,
I haven't read any of the childcare's book,
but do you have any advice that you would give
to someone whose parents don't speak English
but we can engage these children on a different level to help them
to read while they're at home?
>> Well, I think the only thing you can ever do to people,
you try to get them to understand how serious it is.
I mean, that's what I was trying to do today,
and hopefully in a couple of sentences, yeah.
Look, if these kids don't --
and this is not an attack on where they came from
or on their native language, and it's not trying
to diminish their language,
it's just that in this country it really is going to be useful
for them to really be able to speak English very well/and be able
to read English very well.
And I think on the publishing side, it's not even the publishers,
it's more the retailers, trying to do a little bit more of Spanish
to English and English to Spanish.
Somebody else?
No questions?
Yeah?
>> Did you ever read [inaudible]?
>> Did I ever read John--
>> John [Inaudible].
>> I haven't.
>> No?
>> No, and I am young.
Go ahead.
>> [Inaudible].
The question that I had related to your statement
about how do you get boys to read, and my experience is
that boys will read about things that interest them,
and mostly what interests them are vehicles and sports.
>> That's changing a little now, but yeah, absolutely.
>> And monsters, but vehicles and sports are right at the top.
And when I go into children's bookstores and children's libraries,
I look for the things that they have for boys,
and I'm really disappointed in [inaudible].
>> Yep, yep, yep, yep, no, I agree.
The next middle school, the subtitle is Football Is My Life,
and I Drive to Middle School in a truck.
Anybody? Don't be afraid.
No, be afraid.
>> Thank you, Mr. Patterson.
>> Hi.
>> I wanted to ask you if -- you spoke of your humble beginnings
and what was it or who was it who connected you with --
>> We weren't humble, we were proud people, poor.
>> Your proud and poor beginnings with resources.
But what was it for you, or who was it for you that connected you
with books and the printed word and the pleasure of words?
>> I don't think it was anybody connected me with books.
My grandmother was a great motivator because she was the person
that said, you can be anything you want to be except you're not going
to play in the NBA, but you can do a lot of things.
And there are a lot of things open to you, which is what I said
to a lot of these kids today.
You're getting a good foundation
and you can really take that to a lot of places.
The reading was more of an accident, and when I wound
up at this hospital I just had a lot of time and I just started to read
like crazy and I loved it, then I started scribbling and I loved that.
So -- yeah?
[ Background noise ]
>> I've had a number of teachers, both of my own teachers and friends
who have become teachers, tell me that they can't assign a book
with a girl protagonist to boys above the second grade
because the boys won't relate, and so they're only willing
to pick books with boy protagonists.
Do you think that there's something that can be done earlier
so that boys feel like they can connect with female protagonists?
>> If I was a teacher I just would not take that point of view.
I'd say look, when I read about a girl, TS.
Tough Situation.
You know, the Middle School series, it starts out with Ray Cacciatori,
and he's in Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life.
One of the next books is My Brother's a Big Fat Liar,
and it's his sister, and she negates everything
that he said in the first book.
>> [Inaudible].
>> No. And Treasure Hunters, the boy is the verbal narrator
and his twin sister draws all the pictures.
Just because the world has been crazy doesn't mean that we're going
to continue to allow it to be crazy.
I guess it depends on where you are, but I do think that's
in the teacher's control, up to a point.
>> My name is Justina Ahmad and I wish to greet you, Mr. Patterson,
for your [inaudible] contributions to education.
My question or help I will need is I'm interested
in writing for young readers.
Can you please give me a good website or book
that can give me self-study to be able to develop my skills?
Thank you.
>> Get you started to develop your skills?
>> Yes. I'm interested in writing for young readers.
>> I'm going to have somebody talk to you,
because that's just not my area.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> I should do that, develop my skills,
but I kind of arrogantly think I'm past that.
>> Yes, thank you.
>> But somebody from the publisher will talk to you.
Nice lady in the hat.
[ Inaudible voices ]
>> I'm struggling with a 14-year-old smart kid who just flat
out doesn't want to read, a boy.
He's Czech, and his English is quite good
so that's maybe a little bit of his problem.
Is there one of your books or another
that would most likely engage this guy?
All he wants to do is play video games?
>> 14. You know, most of my books --
once kids get into them they seem to like them a lot.
The Maximum Ride series is kind of adventurous.
It's about kids who were brought up in a laboratory
and can fly, and it's very readable.
Treasure Hunters -- that might be a little younger for him.
Probably of my stuff, Maximum Ride.
Interesting with Maximum Ride, just in terms of how much kids can get
into the books, there are 20,000 films that kids have made
about Maximum Ride that are on YouTube that they've added,
and some of them are really very, very good.
Yes, sir?
>> Well, one of the things that we've heard and learned from is
that if children are surrounded by books, then they start
to get interested in books.
Now, we're moving to an electronic age, where it's hard to sound people
with iPads that represent books.
How do you make the transition and yet keep the interest alive?
>> Well, I think part of it is we just have to make sure
that there's a strong association between stories and the world
of non-fiction and those screens, that when they pick up that screen,
that one of the strong associations they have are, this is where I read.
I'm carrying a library with me, small library.
l can be carrying 30 books when I'm traveling on this little machine,
so just making that association because kids like screens.
Look, we made these incredible transitions to televisions a lot
of leaps we've taken, and I think that's a very doable one.
We just have to make sure that that association is strong.
Yep?
>> What are you reading right now?
>> What am I reading right now?
I am reading David and Goliath and I'm so mad at Malcolm Gladwell,
and I'm going to tell you why, Michael Peach.
I'm reading that.
I'm always reading about 10 things at the same time and I never can --
I have to carry a card from now on, oh, okay, I'm --
but David and Goliath comes to mind.
That is one of the things I'm reading.
Anybody? Couple more and then we'll --
>> I have a question.
I've noticed that you've written several books with other authors,
and I've read fashion designers who work as teams,
say that their best products are the ones that they argue the most about.
Would you have a similar interpretation
of your work with other authors?
>> No. No.
They have -- there's a fascist that runs my company.
It's a funny thing with working collaborations.
People are very funny about it.
If you go through Europe and a lot of the art-well
and cathedrals you'll find that a lot
of several painters are involved.
In the film business, very often TV shows it's a team.
There are teams all over the place, music business.
Sometimes I carry a little sheet around -- just an interesting --
Gilbert & Sullivan, Simon & Garfunkel, Lennon & McCartney,
Woodward & Bernstein, Joel & Ethan Coen, Larry David
and Jerry Seinfeld, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, there are just tons of people working together,
and I think in my case, I have really strong storytelling skills.
My style skills are okay.
They can be good if I really torture myself.
And so I love to work with stylists, who that's just easier for them
and the storytelling's easy for me.
But it's not as odd as people --
they're not thinking it through a little bit in terms
of how prevalent it is in the world.
>> Hi. I want to thank you so much for speaking up.
I'm studying right now working on my Master's in Library Science,
and I am working as a volunteer as well as a part-time librarian
in Alexandria, with reluctant readers.
This is our only copy of your book that we have in our library,
and I just want to say again, thank you for speaking up about
For Librarians, and can we get your signature on our only copy?
>> Absolutely.
Let me try to get you some books, too.
All right, thank you very much.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.