Torture reading?

I've bought and read all about Spell to Write and Read and can't decide if I like it.

I like intensive phonics and have become a better speller by working through it myself, but I can't get over her phrase "torture reading" to describe early reading by children who haven't already memorized something like 200 words (which, in SWR, they have examined phonetically and not just memorized by sight).

Torture reading? I can barely get books out of my son's hands and he's well on his way to memorizing words - by seeing them in books all the time.

We started with some super-silly phonetic readers which had my son laughing out loud, but after about a month of those, he moved onto anything and everything he could get his hands on, but usually real books that he had heard me reading aloud in the past. That is how we've moved into a whole-word phonetic blend, with difficult words he can recognize by context within a sea of decipherable words.

We pick up SWR every few weeks and work through a word list. We've made our way through 60 words so far and my son knows about 40 phonograms. I don't know if it will stick at some point. I'm glad we're doing it, but I'm still in the dating phase.