Free voluntary reading

I recommend all my students ought to read as much as they like and I really want to find out how free voluntary reading works so I've just bought The Adventures of Tom Sawyer + CD (Oxford Bookworms Library, Stage 1) for my brother. He's going to be my guinea pig but not the only one. As EFL Geek once pointed out, all language teachers should be learning a foreign language so they could better relate to what their students have to go through. Therefore, I also signed up for a year membership at Institut Français de Prague and borrowed a couple graded readers (littérature facile).

Mind you, I've been through 3 semesters of the worst possibly devastating grammar-translation university instruction of 'here you have a crap book, go memorize it and come back for your exam' type and first I've got to restore my relationship with French crushed by this horrendous approach.