The power of pleasure reading: The case of dystopias

Wilhelm, J., & Smith, M.W. (2016). The power of pleasure reading: The case of dystopias. Voices from the Middle, 23(4), 55-61.


If you have felt despair about the likelihood of getting adolescent students to engage with and enjoy reading, this article will give you hope. Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith present a picture of how such engaged reading can look. They make the case that pleasure is an essential component of reading engagement, and they outline four different kinds of pleasures that readers get from reading: 1) immersive play pleasure, 2) social pleasure, 3) intellectual pleasure, and 4) work pleasure. Each type of pleasure is defined, and a few examples of each kind of pleasure, as expressed by middle school students the authors interviewed, are provided. Then the authors make a few general recommendations for teachers to facilitate students’ developing each kind of pleasure in reading.

Wilhelm and Smith’s study looked at why middle school readers enjoyed reading certain kinds of self-selected texts that are often not part of what is considered “good literature” in school. In this article, the focus is on students who enjoyed dystopian novels (e.g., The Hunger Games), but the larger study also looked at romance, horror, fantasy, and literature about vampires (the larger study is in the authors’ latest book, Reading Unbound, published by Scholastic). The bottom line in this work is that engaged reading is about reading for pleasure. If readers can experience pleasure from these kinds of books, how can we get them to experience that kind of pleasure from texts they read for school?

I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of the first kind of pleasure: play pleasure. In other words, we engage deeply in anything we do (not just reading!) primarily because it is fun! It feels good! I loved the exploration of what happens when we play. Here, the authors tie play pleasure to Lev Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development. They propose that when we play, we are trying out the limits of our “ZPD”, in effect rehearsing experiences we may not have mastered yet, but this process of “experimenting” (p. 56) helps us grow and develop.
Wilhelm and Smith describe play in relationship to reading as “an immediate and totally immersive pleasure of living through the story world and events” (p. 56). Readers who have had the experience of “getting lost in a book” or reading something they “couldn’t put down” know the sensual pleasure of this kind of engagement with reading. Wilhelm and Smith maintain that this is the most basic kind of pleasure in reading, a “prerequisite” to all the other kinds of pleasure.

Finding social pleasure in reading has a number of aspects; reading is definitely a social process in many ways. Wilhelm and Smith discuss the obvious types of classroom interactions (e.g., paired and grouped activities to talk about texts) that we can facilitate among students, but they also talk about the reader’s relationship with the characters of the story and with the author of the text. They even make suggestions for strengthening teacher-student relationships. I liked their recommendation that teachers make “a pact” with their students to read one of “their” texts if the students will read one of the texts the teacher wants them to read (p. 57). I plan to find a way to do this with my own students. Peer connections are, of course, the most powerful connections in adolescence, but that does not mean adults cannot model mature reading behavior and openness to reading new texts, texts they might not ordinarily choose but will read to build social connections.

Intellectual pleasure in reading may be the hardest sell for young readers, and it also is the type of reading motivation that is most congruent with the traditional values of school. To me, this concept was about taking students to the higher levels of comprehending texts. They need to see the reasons why reading about something is important, and what the “big ideas” of texts are. That kind of pleasure can be very satisfying, but it has to be nurtured for many students. Wilhelm and Smith tie this kind of pleasure to the notion of “essential questions” that students can ask and answer about texts. Examples of such questions are presented in a sidebar.

Work pleasure is seen in two ways. The most obvious meaning is that we read to get something done that is useful to us. Those of us who pursue hobbies, or even who get this kind of reading done in the workplace, know the pleasure of reading something that helps you do what you need to do. There’s another kind of work also discussed here, and that is working on ourselves—what Wilhelm and Smith call “inner work” (p. 59). Reading can help us grow by helping us understand who we are—and maybe helping us visualize who we can become.

This article only provides a few of the middle school study participants’ responses, and we only get to hear a few of their voices. I found I wanted to hear more, and I wanted to know a little more about the study. The article here is aimed toward classroom practitioners, and gives us a lot that would help teachers at least begin to think about activities for engaging middle schoolers with texts, but it didn’t go far enough for me. I’m interested in going deeper on this, since reading engagement is a major interest for me, and I am considering getting the authors’ most recent book to explore further. Funny thing—the journal had an ad for that book prominently featured just inside the front cover!