Brandon Mull, best-selling children’s author will visit Kaua‘i schools next week with a message: When you stop reading it drastically affects your life. The decline of reading for pleasure will hurt children’s academic performance, career prospects and future earnings. Those
Brandon Mull, best-selling children’s author will visit Kaua‘i schools next week with a message: When you stop reading it drastically affects your life.
The decline of reading for pleasure will hurt children’s academic performance, career prospects and future earnings. Those who read in their free time earn higher wages and participate more in civic activities such as volunteering and voting. They even exercise more, according to a 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Youth ages 15 to 24 spend an average of seven minutes a day reading for pleasure, compared to two hours spent watching TV. This is leading some sociologists to speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the 19th century.
Mull’s latest volume, “Fablehaven: Rise of the Evening Star,” debuted on The New York Times children’s bestseller list, and the movie rights were recently sold to Avi Arad, producer of the Spiderman films. The books are so hot that Mull was invited by Borders to appear with them this past spring at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation’s largest.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote in October “The series is generating buzz as a contender in the fantasy-adventure genre to replace the Harry Potter franchise,” and The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly have mentioned Fablehaven as a strong candidate to be the next big fantasy series.
The books feature a sister and brother who set out to save a preserve for enchanted creatures. Mull embeds important messages in his series, including that there are consequences to our actions.
Brandon Mull has worked as a comedian, a filing clerk, a patio installer, a movie promoter, a copywriter and briefly as a chicken stacker.
His favorite job is writing fiction. He travels the country visiting schools, promoting literacy, and sharing his message that “imagination can take you places.”
“Rise of the Evening Star” is the second book in the Fablehaven series. A fortune cookie once proclaimed he would become a New York Times best-selling author. It now hangs on his fridge.
Book signing and
school assemblies
• 9:20 a.m. assembly, Monday at Kaumualii Elementary School
• 12:15 p.m. assembly, Monday at Kapa‘a Elementary School
• 8 a.m. to noon, assemblies Tuesday at Waimea Canyon Intermediate School
• 7 p.m. Tuesday, book signing at Border’s Books and Music
