Links: book spine poetry, Hilary Duff as author, and a defense of gaming

Some of this is sort of old (in Internet time, at least), but I’ve been trying hard to get all of my work for the next week and a half done before I leave for PLA and neglecting my RSS feeds, so it’s all new to me!

100 Scope Notes had a great post earlier this month with book spine poetry. I love these!

Just Ask Marlene announces that Hilary Duff has signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster beginning with ELIXIR. “Hillary tells her fans that she loves reading great adventure books, especially ones like Elixir that feature a strong, inspiring female character.” Look for ELIXIR this October or preorder at Amazon now.

And finally, Amanda Gardner at BusinessWeek writes that “boys who own a video game system don’t do as well academically as their non-playing peers,” but the study author, Robert Weis, clarifies:

“we can never say with 100 percent certainty that it’s playing video games that causes kids to have delays or deficits in reading and writing performance, but … we can be pretty confident that it’s the game ownership and the amount of time they spend playing that causes these academic delays.”

I feel the need to rise to video games’ defense. Lots of things from chess to rock music has been branded the downfall of our youth and video games are just the latest form of entertainment to add to the list. Any hobby–sports or gaming or even reading–will take away from academic study time. Should kids give up all of their hobbies just because it’d give them more time to spend on school? Hobbies are beneficial for so many reasons (they help us develop socially, they help us develop other skills, and they give us something to do to get a break from our work at the very least) and in fact, the Department of Defense published a news item earlier this year about the benefits of video gaming.

Furthermore, the study population was boys whose families didn’t own video game systems, so it’s possible that the time the boys spent on gaming would level off as they played for a while and having video games in their own homes wasn’t an exciting new thing anymore. The study also found that reading and writing scores dropped, but that math scores remained consistent, so it’s not just a matter of time spent on video games that could be spent on studying.

I’m not saying that playing video games is always good or that there are only benefits and no drawbacks, but knee-jerk “gaming is bad” reactions and headlines to studies with more nuance drive me crazy. The truth, as usual, is probably not in one extreme or the other, but rather somewhere in the middle.

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Leave a Comment March 23, 2010

Links: larger women and book covers, the popularity of youth lit, and dads reading to daughters

In a delightful bit of crossover, Gwen over at Sociological Images rounds up a bunch of covers of books about larger girls, most of whom don’t look that big on the cover. There’s also been some discussion about how the women on these covers are mostly disembodied parts–common in advertising (see here, here, and here for examples)–but there’s also been counter-discussion positing that it’s because publishers think that women want to be able to identify with characters and that’s harder when you can see their face. I’m not sure I buy that; I’d like to see a study sampling books with covers depicting men and covers depicting women that determines if there is a gender difference in whether or not faces are shown. And what about YA book covers?

Susan Carpenter writes for the LA Times about the rising popularity of YA lit among adults. She addresses the increasing sales of youth lit in general (“Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.”), acknowledges the rise in critical acclaim for youth lit, and points to the growing number of movies based off of books for teens and children (my husband and I are finally going to go see the Percy Jackson movie this weekend!). She also makes the great point that current YA writers grew up when YA books were finally starting to mature:

Many of today’s young adult authors were born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s, when YA began to move beyond the staid, emotionless tales of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys in favor of more adventurous work from Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle and Robert Cormier. Now, they’re turning out their own modern masterpieces.

And finally, Lee Wind of I’m Here. I’m Queer. Now what the Hell do I read? has a post about reading with his daughter and what other dads need to know about reading with their own daughters. He paints a beautiful picture of a household full of readers and also touches on dialogic reading, which we’ve been talking about in my Youth Services class recently. I also love how he gets to the heart of why, beyond developmental and literacy-related reasons, reading with kids is so great: “Reading is the doorway to a Shared experience with your kid. Don’t just read it TO her. Experience it WITH her.”

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3 Comments March 11, 2010