Sorry if I'm repeating anything already said, but I used to work in special ed with reluctant (and stubborn!) readers and we had lots of success using games that built their confidence, and finding printed word in other places besides leveled readers, which seemed to immediately turn them off. Kids' magazines, comics, etc were great tools for keeping them engaged.
One favorite activity was cutting out letters from magazine/newspaper ads and using them to put words together (words of their choosing, or preselected vocab words, usually from the same word family or something similar). Then the real fun (and I have had success with this with my ds too) was letting them be the teacher and ask another student, or the teacher, what word they had just made. We would feign confusion and get the answer wrong ad then they would giggle excitedly and tell us what it REALLY said. If you are a good enough actor, you can even teach them new words using this same method, and they will think they are teaching themselves, or that they knew it all along.
My ds doesn't have the attention span for a formal phonics lesson but he really wants to read, so for now we are doing a lot of sight word drill games and just incorporating phonics into our day by talking about letter sounds and so forth in the car. In that situation the sight words are a great boost to his confidence as an emerging reader. We use these books:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/specials/kids/behindthepulse/trucktown/books.html
They are actually leveled readers (the ready-to-roll series) but my ds absolutely loves them, where he won't have anything to do with BOB books or anything similar. We read the same one over and over for a couple weeks as ds practices reading them (but he is only 3)....I don't know what will happen when we run out of trucktown books! Of course, he has them memorized, lol, but since we have started working with the books systematically I notice that he is recognizing those same words and now trying to decode other words that look similar, in other books, on signs at the store, and so forth. So the sight reading is not as limiting as I thought it would be.
Another though I had, that worked well with my ex-BIL when he was about 8, and reaing at kindergarten/1st grade level, was to do a read aloud every night. I read to him from the boxcar children. I read him the first two chapters, to get his interest piqued. Then, I told him that it made my voice tired to read so much to we would need to take turns...I would read a paragraph, and he would read one. The turns were brief enough that I didn't have to worry he would lose the storyline and lose interest if his comprehension took a backseat to his focus on decoding the words. It was excellent practice and he came to look forward to it. In about two months he was reading at or near grade level.
Also, starfall.com is really fun.....I give them a lot of credit for helping ds learn the letter sounds. At one point 95% of his screen time was on starfall. He preferred that to watching TV!
If you want ideas for some specific games, activities and ideas I'd be happy to share some of the things we did in our special ed class, just let me know!