Books with Bite
The theme of Teen Read Week (see below) this year is Books with Bite. If you like books about vampires, werewolves, or other man-eating monsters, this week is for you; check out what we've got on the subject:
Teen Read (?!) Week
Every year in October, the American Library Association sets aside a week to celebrate teens reading. Some of you may twitter when you hear those two words together: "Teens?! Reading?!" Many people seem to assume that teens have given up reading in favor of watching TV and listening to their ipods and chatting on the Internets. However, Dave Eggers, the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, recently wrote an article for Esquire questioning this very premise, and we think he makes a good argument:
"It's like a tic. Or a reflex. (Are tics and reflexes significantly different?) The point is, it's an automatic response, in virtually all humans, to think that things are getting worse. Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex--lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough.
But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a . . . dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions--that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020--are borne out by any proof whatsoever.
The truth is that American publishers put out 411,000 individual titles last year, an all-time record, and netted $25 billion--hardly a sagging industry. And those kids who have abandoned books for electronic media? Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks."
As Eggers notes, we are publishing and selling more books than ever before, and we would bet that most of those books do not go unread. Furthermore, with so much information surrounding us, on TV, on websites and blogs and wikis, on billboards and in newspapers and magazines, it is virtually impossible not to pass the day reading. It may be a different kind of reading, but it is still reading.
Here's to thinking about teens and reading a little bit differently during Teen Read Week.
"It's like a tic. Or a reflex. (Are tics and reflexes significantly different?) The point is, it's an automatic response, in virtually all humans, to think that things are getting worse. Medieval peasants lamented how good the Cro-Magnons had it; people in the Renaissance looked back on the Dark Ages with great fondness. This is a harmless enough reflex--lazy and uncritical, sure, but usually harmless enough.
But when it concerns how we see young people, and how we perceive the landscape of learning and literacy, this kind of doomsaying is a . . . dangerous kind of intellectual sloth. When we assume, as most adults do, that kids are less literate, less interested in books, than ever before, it involves a willful kind of ignorance, and it imperils how we educate young people. Few if any of these dire assumptions--that no one under 18 reads, that all books will be obsolete by 2020--are borne out by any proof whatsoever.
The truth is that American publishers put out 411,000 individual titles last year, an all-time record, and netted $25 billion--hardly a sagging industry. And those kids who have abandoned books for electronic media? Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks."
As Eggers notes, we are publishing and selling more books than ever before, and we would bet that most of those books do not go unread. Furthermore, with so much information surrounding us, on TV, on websites and blogs and wikis, on billboards and in newspapers and magazines, it is virtually impossible not to pass the day reading. It may be a different kind of reading, but it is still reading.
Here's to thinking about teens and reading a little bit differently during Teen Read Week.
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