Boy Books - Introduction and Point the Fifth
This post has been in the back of my head all weekend and it will not go away. Which means that even though I should be in bed and my homework will now be late! you are getting this post because it is eating my brain and won't let me think of anything else.
So....Books for boys.
First, I want to start out by saying that I think this is a topic very much worth discussing. The stats are much more troubling that people realize and there are some fundamental problems with kinds of books available and marketed to kids and teens.
I just happen to think that 9 times out of 10 when people talk about it, they completely miss what the problems actually are and so end up contradicting the most important things that we need to do to increase the number of boys reading, boys standardized test scores in reading, etc. They also all miss the points in such uniform ways that I feel it's worth my time to draft a standard response that I can just point to or crib from whenever this topic comes up.
I have five main points to make and I'm going to spread them out over several posts, going from what I think are the least to most important. So here goes:
NUMBER 5: If Robert Lipsyte is so concerned with boys finding his books, why does his site look like it should be hosted by geocities?
(hat tip to Karen Healey and Saundra Mitchell for the Times article)
The author is no longer dead; she is very much alive and kicking - usually on twitter or tumblr, but also sometimes livejournal, facebook, and wordpress.
And yes, she. Not because so! many! more! kidlit! and teenlit! authors! are female! but because the ones on social media usually are. Unless they are John Green* and then they are also on youtube and have a shitload of fan powered side projects going on - but since he is on social media and writes about love, he is too girly for boys to read so he doesn't count. Or something.
Connecting with young fans is not a new thing for teenlit. Cromier used his own phone number in I am the Cheese because he felt a 555 number one would make the story seem fake, and then proceeded to get into long conversations with the teens that called the number. The internet now makes it absurdly easy for teens and authors to connect in similar ways, and it is this ability to connect with authors and fellow fans that has helped fuel the recent rise of teen lit. So unless your name is Patterson, if you aren't on the internet, you don't exist.
And judging by the number of male kid/teenlit authors on twitter? No, they don't exist. (That doesn't mean they aren't on the shelves though, that's a separate issue that I'll get to later.) No one ever mentions this though, or argues that perhaps the authors themselves need to get with the program, rather than the publishers, librarians, and teachers. Just saying.
*Or David Levithan, Patrick Carmen, or Scott Westerfeld. But Levithan writes about gay boys and Westefeld and Carmen write stories about girls sometimes, so I'm not sure they count either. In any case, there are still a lot fewer male teenlit authors that are engaged online than there are female authors