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experiences that show them that books have the same magic. They have never been given the chance to discover the worlds that books can contain. Because so many students’ reading choices are dictated by their teachers, they never learn how to choose books for themselves. How can they shape a self-identity as a reader if they never get the chance to find out what they like? If you are a student and your entire class is reading one book together (a common practice), what do you do if you don’t like that book? How would that uninteresting book color your view of books in general? By denying students the opportunity to choose their own books to read, teachers are giving students a fish year after year but never teaching them to go near the water, much less fish for themselves.
    Because dormant readers are good enough readers, able to jump through the reading hoops in the typical classroom, they don’t garner much concern from teachers—but they should. Students who don’t read, even if they are capable of completing reading tasks at school, run the risk of falling behind students who read more than they do. After all, Mark Twain reminds us, “The man who does not read great books is no better than the man who can’t.” At the beginning of the year, I find that dormant readers constitute the largest segment of readers in my classes.
Hope
    Hope provides an example of what a dormant reader looks like on arrival in one of our classrooms. Despite the fact that Hope succeeded in her schoolwork and excelled on state assessments every year, she did not see herself as a reader and found few books worth reading. I placed book after book in her hands, hoping she would find one that she liked. Hope took my offerings dutifully at first. Some she read, and some she snuck back onto the shelf. Slowly, she began to find books that spoke to her eclectic spirit. She gravitated toward books with bizarre settings and fantastical elements, like The Giver , by Lois Lowry, and Coraline , by Neil Gaiman. When Hope began to express preferences for certain types of books, I had seeds of information that helped me lead her to more books. I have a penchant for fantasy, science fiction, and traditional literature (legends, myths, and fairy tales). Hope and I connected over our shared love of Greek mythology in particular, so I suggested books to her that I knew she would enjoy reading. The more books I recommended that she liked, the more Hope trusted me to suggest books.
    What Hope needed was a chance to browse through lots of books every day and an opportunity to read widely. I remember how reluctant Hope once was when I see her these days, legs slung over a chair in our school lobby, waiting on her ride home, nose buried in a book. She is still a regular visitor to my library, even though she left my class long ago.
Underground Readers
    Underground readers are gifted readers, but they see the reading they are asked to do in school as completely disconnected from the reading they prefer to do on their own. Underground readers just want to read and for the teacher to get out of the way and let them. I was this type of reader in high school. While my teacher spent six weeks dragging the class through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter , a book I finished in a week, I whiled away the time by creeping myself out with Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and mind-traveling to Polynesia through James Michener’s Hawaii . In accordance with the unwritten contract between my teacher and me, she overlooked my obvious boredom with her class and I kept my mouth shut and my head down, reading from my own book, which I kept hidden inside my desk. I took sly pride in the fact that I earned an A+ on the final for Huckleberry Finn when I had not even finished the last third of the book. The teacher belabored the plot and her interpretation of it for so long that I knew what she would ask us on the test without even reading the