Question: what should young people be reading?

March 24, 2011

Answer: books they want to read.

Now here’s the longer version.

A couple of days ago I had a really frustrating interaction with someone. Part of the frustration came from me not being in a position to debate the merit of this person’s statement, but part of it also comes from her opinion being a widely held one among people who don’t actually work with kids and books that I suspect other librarians fight on a regular basis as well.

Let me give you some context. Our local middle school has a Battle of the Books in which each English class competes against each other. Students are given a list of about 100 “recommended reading” books and are encouraged to read books from the list throughout the year. Then, as the school year is winding down, each class picks who will be on their official team, and those teams compete against one another in a trivia contest that draws facts from the books on the list. Whichever team answers the most questions correctly wins.

So I was having a conversation with this woman about middle schoolers in our community, and she said that she just loves the Battle of the Books because it gets kids reading “good books instead of that Clique stuff¹,” and at that point it was hard for me to not start a fight, because–and I think she’d find this shocking and appalling, and might think I’m a Bad Librarian because of it–I’d much rather see a middle school kid reading a Clique book or Twilight or a graphic novel for fun than see the same student struggling through a Classic Novel of Great Merit, hating every minute of it.

Allow me a few parameters and caveats. This isn’t really about what books get assigned in English classes. I’d really like to see more contemporary titles with similar themes or literary devices as the “classics,” but I understand that fitting things into the curriculum (or changing the curriculum) and developing lesson plans from scratch can be hard, and schools are under a lot more pressure to provide books that strengthen kids’ moral fiber or introduce them to our “universal” culture or indoctrinate students into the “right” kind of thinking (or at least don’t lead them astray with the “wrong” kind of thinking) or whatever.

Furthermore, I don’t have a problem with the Battle of the Books program itself. I mean, libraries all around the country do something similar, and it can be a cool way to get kids excited about reading and about books. That’s great! We need to find more ways of doing that. An essential component of lifelong reading is getting kids to like reading. (I suppose you could argue that more is not always better, as British authors are doing right now around the whole “kids should be reading 50 books a year” thing, but again, there’s a difference between what schools do and what public libraries do.) And the Battle of the Books book list isn’t just classics: the lists also include Newbery winners, other award winners, bestsellers, and even actually popular books (like The Lightning Thief and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). But it is definitely a list that is intended to highlight Good Literature and exclude “trashy” reads.

So really, it’s not the Battle of the Books or the books themselves, and you can, of course, make an argument for having classics in the YA section. It’s not the classics that I have a problem with–it’s giving kids choice. What’s really killing me here is this woman’s assumption that classics = good and popular books = bad, regardless of any other circumstances surrounding the situation. Later in the conversation, the recent smallish expansion of our teen area came up, and this woman responded, “Oh, good! They really need so much room to study,” completely missing the point that the books in our teen area are mostly fiction and that the teen area has also been evolving to become more of a space for hanging out than a space for tutoring. It was just really clear to me that she sees libraries as books + studying and that kids should only be reading Books of Great Merit.

Kids will have assigned reading in school, and that’s fine. But they also need to have choice in what they read, and those choice needs to not be policed for literary merit. That kids’ recreational reading choices are scrutinized by adults who think they know better is infuriating. No one lectures adults on how they should stop reading Dan Brown or put down the latest John Grisham book and instead pick up War and Peace or Ulysses or something. No one’s going to look at an adult who comes home from a long day at work and plops down to watch American Idol and say, “Are you really watching that trash again? You should be watching a documentary,” but man, kids go to class for seven or eight hours a day, have sports practice or clubs or music lessons or part-time jobs after that, go home and do their homework–and then are expected to read books that will make them better people instead of books that they want to read? You’ve got to be kidding me.

LizB–once again–has it right: the 50 books every child should read starts with #1: a book of their choice, continues with #2: a book of their choice, and keeps going that way. That’s how you build lifelong readers, how you get people to for fun–you let them read things that interest them. And as the British authors who stood up for kids and their reading pointed out, requiring kids to read 50 books a year while simultaneously cutting library funding and closing libraries is also crap. Kids need choice in their reading materials, and they need libraries to have that choice.

¹ The Clique books seem to be the go-to “these books are bad” books in my community–I’m not really sure why it’s The Clique in particular and not Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars or The A-List or any other of the many series like that in my library that are very popular.

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Tags: choice in reading, commentary, ya lit