I was rather intrigued by the title of this article
because, as most school librarians would agree, there isn’t a wrong sort of book,
every book has its reader – you just have to try and put the two together, easier
said than done! I’m not bothered with what my students read as long as they
actually do read – which means I’m happy them picking up newspapers, magazines,
reading from websites, e-books, car manuals, even White Dwarf which could be
written in another language for all the sense I can make of it!
Although there is actually a “wrong sort of book” …. it’s
the one that is not right for the student at that time. So many of them just
grab the nearest book when they are told to find something to read. Some will
choose a book based on the cover (and let’s face it, that’s the first thing you
make your decision on which is why they’re so important … publishers please
note), a few will read the blurb. The problem is, if they select a book that is
too easy for them they’ll be bored with it; if it’s too hard, they won’t
understand it; and if it’s the sort of genre they don’t enjoy then they just
won’t connect with the book at all. And if they do this time and time again,
then eventually they’ll come to the decision that reading is boring. So yes …
it is possible to have the wrong sort of book because the right sort will
engage the reader, make them want to read it and then make them want to repeat
the experience.
In an ideal world, all children would be readers. But
even if they were, they wouldn’t pick “literary” titles every time. Adults don’t
yet I’m always surprised at how people expect this sort of reading from
teenagers, even though, when you look at adult patterns of reading, they dip
and meander through a whole myriad of titles. Over the past couple of months, my
reading has gone from the Carnegie and Greenaway shortlist http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/pressdesk/press.php?release=pres_2013_short_combined.html
through a thriller by Linwood Barclay, The Humans by Matt Haig, delved into
some non-fiction on the London Underground and Venice, and I’m now working my
way through the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist http://www.booktrust.org.uk/news-blogs-and-press/news/198
... oh and then there’s the newspapers I skim whilst I’m having coffee, the
magazines I buy, and even the free ones from the high-street supermarkets get
read. Not to mention my professional journals, various enewsletters and blogs …
I did mention that I was rather obsessed with reading, didn’t I?
What I pick up depends on the mood I’m in, how much
time I’ve got and how much I want to concentrate on what I’m reading. At times
I like to struggle with ideas and concepts, words that stop me reading and set
me off on a train of thought, sometimes I want to disappear inside my book and
ignore the world, other times I just want to chill out and relax but still
engage with those around me. This isn’t right or wrong, it’s just the way I connect
with words. And surely we should allow teenagers and young adults the same
concessions when they read?
Mr Gove would have us believe that he spent his youth
immersed in worthy works but this cannot be true. Children don’t learn to read
with Dickens, Hardy and Eliot. Is he expecting us to accept that he never read
a Beano or Hotspur comic? If he didn’t, then no wonder he has such a warped
sense of books, reading and libraries. He is also forgetting the fact that when
he was a teenager, he didn’t have the choice of entertainment that is around
today – 24 hour TV, films on demand, the internet, social networking, phones
with free unlimited texts – you can’t ignore these and expect teenagers not to
be involved with today’s technology, which means working with it to promote and
encourage reading.
My advice would be … if you find a teenager immersed in
a book, leave them. Go and read the same
book then, when they’ve finished it, you can discuss it together!
No comments:
Post a Comment