Texas has decided that there are some books children should simply have to read.

In June, the State Board of Education approved a statewide reading list for public schools. It contains nearly 200 works across kindergarten through high school and is supposed to start taking effect in the 2030–31 school year.

By high school, we are talking about some serious reading: Animal Farm, Great Expectations, Julius Caesar, Dante's Inferno, Fahrenheit 451, The Scarlet Letter, Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice, alongside poems, speeches, essays, political texts and passages from the Bible.

My first reaction was actually quite positive. There is something appealing about saying that education should expose young people to certain books, ideas and perspectives instead of simply hoping they stumble across them somewhere.

Then I thought about my piano teacher, and suddenly I wasn't quite so sure.

When I was a kid, I learned to play piano. A teacher came to our house and taught me, and I actually enjoyed playing.

There was just one problem. She wanted me to play classical music. Beethoven and the usual suspects.

I understood why. Those pieces obviously have value, they teach technique, and they have survived for hundreds of years for a reason. I just didn't feel anything when I played them.

What I wanted to play was the music I actually listened to. Songs from the charts. Modern music. Things I knew and liked.

So at some point I asked whether we could play some of that as well, and she said no.

Eventually I made what, looking back, was a surprisingly commercial argument for a kid: We are paying you to teach me. I actually want to play piano. Shouldn't you also be somewhat interested in keeping me interested?

Apparently that was not the winning argument I thought it was.

She quit, and shortly afterwards, so did I.

I didn't find another piano teacher. I didn't suddenly develop a deeper appreciation for Beethoven. I basically stopped playing piano altogether.

That is the part I keep coming back to when I look at the Texas debate, because my teacher may have been completely right that playing Beethoven would have made me a better pianist. But she was so focused on teaching me what she believed I should play that she lost the kid who actually wanted to play piano.

That feels relevant.

What are we actually trying to achieve?

Reading for pleasure among young people is declining quite dramatically.

According to the latest NAEP long-term trend data, only 14% of American 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day. In 2012, it was 27%.

That should worry everyone, and if you work in publishing, it should probably worry you even more.

And this isn't only an American problem. Here in Germany, the latest book-market figures are pretty brutal as well: the number of book buyers between 10 and 15 fell by more than 30% in 2025.

But there is an interesting wrinkle in the same data. Among 16- to 19-year-olds, buyer numbers actually went up, while Young Adult and New Adult were among the parts of the market still growing.

That doesn't prove that teenagers will read if we just give them the “right” books. Life is obviously not that simple. But it does make me wonder whether “young people don't read anymore” is really the full story.

We can talk about AI, metadata, discoverability, new formats, subscription models, bookstores and whatever the next big thing is, but underneath all of that sits one fairly important requirement:

People need to want to read.

And this is where I struggle a little with the argument that children simply need to read more difficult books.

I absolutely think they should read difficult books. They should encounter Shakespeare, read things they don't immediately understand, come across ideas they disagree with and occasionally be pushed well outside their comfort zone.

A teacher should absolutely be able to put a book on a desk and say: You would probably never choose this yourself, but trust me, there is something here worth understanding.

I am all for that.

But if we are talking about the decline in reading, I don't think forcing children through a long sequence of books they feel absolutely no connection to is going to solve it. It might actually make things worse.

Why isn't Harry Potter on the list?

This was one of the things that struck me when I looked at the Texas list.

To be fair, it isn't only dusty classics. Younger students get books such as Charlotte's Web, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Outsiders and The Giver, so there is clearly some attempt to balance things.

But I still found myself wondering: Where is Harry Potter? Where is The Lord of the Rings?

I don't mean that Texas has to put either of them on the list. That isn't really my point.

What interests me is why we sometimes seem to place books children voluntarily love into one category and books that are "good for them" into another.

Take The Lord of the Rings. It is long, the language isn't always easy, and there are dozens of characters, histories, cultures, invented languages and an impressive amount of walking. Yet generations of readers have willingly disappeared into it for hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Is that somehow less valuable because nobody had to force them?

A kid reading 1,000 pages of Tolkien because they desperately want to know what happens next is concentrating, remembering characters, following complicated stories, understanding a completely invented world and sticking with something for a very long time.

Basically all the things we keep saying young people no longer do.

They just don't experience it as work.

That seems important to me.

Reading for pleasure or reading for growth?

The debate often ends up separating these two things.

There is reading for pleasure, and then there is serious reading. Reading that makes you grow.

I am not sure that distinction is particularly helpful.

Why can't Harry Potter make somebody grow? Why can't somebody enjoy Shakespeare? Why can't a 12-year-old start with fantasy, discover Tolkien later, read Orwell at 16 and maybe eventually end up with Dostoevsky?

Or not.

People don't develop interests according to curriculum diagrams.

The bigger win is that they become readers. Once somebody loves reading, you have somewhere to go. You can challenge them, push them and show them something completely different.

But you have to get them through the door first.

And this is probably where my piano teacher got it wrong.

Imagine she had said: Okay, Sebastian. Bring me the song you want to play. Let's learn it. And while we're doing that, I'll show you something Beethoven figured out 200 years ago that will make you better at it.

Maybe I would still play piano today.

Who knows. But I suspect the odds would have been considerably better.

Difficulty is good. Sometimes.

There is another part of the Texas argument that I strongly agree with.

We should not react to declining attention spans by making everything shorter, easier and more convenient. We already have quite enough of that.

We are getting very good at removing every bit of friction. If you don't understand the chapter, read the summary. If that is still too much, watch the video. And if you still don't get it, ask AI to explain it in five bullets.

Problem solved.

Or maybe not.

I use AI every day, so this isn't going to turn into one of those "technology is destroying civilization" columns. I have no desire to go back to spending three hours in a library trying to find one obscure piece of information.

But I do think we have to distinguish between different kinds of friction.

Sometimes reading is difficult because you have to think. You read a paragraph twice. You don't immediately understand why a character did something. The author doesn't spoon-feed you the answer. You have to remember something from 200 pages ago.

Good.

That kind of friction is valuable.

But sometimes the friction is simply that you don't care, and those are not the same thing.

If a 14-year-old is interested in reading but every book we give them reinforces the idea that reading means struggling through something somebody else considers important, I don't think we should be surprised if Netflix wins eventually.

The point shouldn't be to make reading easy. It should be to make the effort feel worthwhile.

The list probably matters less than the teacher

This is why I am also not sure the most important argument is whether Great Expectations should or shouldn't be on the Texas list.

Put it on there. It is a great book.

The interesting question is what happens when it lands on a 15-year-old's desk.

A great teacher can take a book a student would never pick up voluntarily and make it interesting. Why did this matter? What was happening at the time? Why are we still talking about it? What is funny about it? What is surprisingly modern? What should we disagree with?

That is very different from: Here are 500 pages you didn't choose. They're important. There will be a test. See you Friday.

One version may create a reader.

The other might create somebody who spends the next 20 years proudly telling people they haven't read a book since school.

And this is where publishers should pay attention

Because we can spend all day talking about how to make books easier to discover, easier to buy and easier to consume. Those are important problems.

But there is another one underneath them.

How do people become readers in the first place, and how do we make sure they stay readers?

You can force a teenager to finish Great Expectations. You can test whether they understood it and make sure they know what Dickens was trying to say.

What you cannot force is what happens six months later when nobody is grading them anymore.

Do they pick up another book?

That, to me, is the much bigger question.

Because surely the goal isn't simply a 15-year-old who successfully completed a reading list. I would rather have a 35-year-old who still walks into a bookstore, opens an ebook or puts on an audiobook because reading became part of their life.

So yes, challenge children. Give them books they would never choose themselves. Make them work through complicated language and uncomfortable ideas.

But also give them books they cannot wait to open.

Let them choose sometimes. Let them read fantasy, romance, graphic novels or whatever gets them excited about reading, and then show them where else books can take them.

My piano teacher won the argument. I never got to play the music I wanted with her.

She also lost the piano player.

I think we should be careful not to do the same thing with readers.

So I am curious: How do we challenge young readers without turning reading into just another piece of homework?