Hmm, I went from reading nothing, learned by the first grade, and then onto Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. Then onto the old Marvel comics like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men.
My dad used to open a box and let me read through as many as I could polish off in his collection. Then he’d open up another box.
I don’t ever really remember ‘advancing’ in reading, I just read everything I got my hands on. By grade 8 I was getting into Heinlein and Asimov, and by then I could read anything you could throw at me. I’m pretty sure that by grade 6 I could have done the same, but I wasn’t all that interested in reading ‘difficult’ stuff just for the sake of reading difficult stuff. Like I said I read anything and everything I could get my hands on.
TV and video games are going to be hard to compete with.
I saw this with my stepson (now in his twenties). In conversations we had he compared video game plots with great literature.
With your average youthful male encouraging reading will be difficult.