To say that I'll post a real one tomorrow, as I'm now caught up enough. Though still a bit scattered and novel-headed. Any requests or suggestions? Because otherwise I'll just do a recent reading capsule review thingie…
The apocalpyseWorld Equestrian Games are finally upon us, which should make for some amusing posts and pics. And some exciting dog walks, during which wealthy Europeans feel threatened by Mighty Puck and Trundly Emma. (I'm pretty sure Acousticats is something they've doggie had nightmares about.)
Now I shall watch the ANTM makeover show. This is the Elevated Season, you know. This time, ANTM is going to be a Real Girl… One of the best fantasytrashy shows on TV.
ETA:
SERIOUSLY, give me a topic(s). I am bereft.
Or you could just go read Maureen Johnson being superbrilliant about how complicated declaring a "boy book crisis" really is and bringing a little bit of perspective to the topic. A snippet:
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be working harder to improve boys’ literacy. Quite the opposite. I’m suggesting is that in doing so, consider the many female authors and readers of today, and think about how we grew up—and frankly, how female readers are still growing up. You can’t turn a blind eye to the basic reality that 50% (or more) of the school population is still getting a steady diet of male authors, even though an astounding variety of women are writing books of extraordinary quality. And it is certainly not the case that we are running out of male authors. That concept is demeaning to everyone.
I have this sense occasionally that there's a whole school of thought out there that We Must Coddle To Boys. We must give them Exactly What They Like And Only That. And it's coming from a very, very specific gender perception of what being a "boy" is. As if being a boy is any less diverse an experience than being a girl. The perception–as Maureen says–that teen boys (and let's face it–boys, generally speaking, when they grow up to be men) won't ever be as adventurous as readers as women. Meaning at least in part that they won't ever read books that could fall under the created heading of girl's or women's fiction by choice. (Let's not forget that women buy most fiction, period.) And if we need any proof that women's opinions and fictional tastes are frequently devalued, we have plenty of recent examples.
Lots of books by women and/or read by girls isn't part of the "crisis in boy literacy," and that won't be solved by pandering. I don't see anyone arguing that getting more boys reading isn't important, but it's just as important to try and expand the notion of what boys should read. Instead, what if the world stopped treating most fiction by women–especially if it has GASP romance in it–as fluff, as something only worth being read by women or girls. You know what? Again, that's *most* fiction readers. We should all be so lucky. Fun is not a bad word, not when the work in question is also whipsmart and brilliantly executed.
The whole idea of "girl books" and "boy books" is as reductive and culturally created as the idea of "boy colors" and "girl colors." It's as dangerous as the idea that those little genre books can never be Literature with the capital L. (Or as Jennifer Crusie recently put it: "literary fiction is just another genre, not God’s Library.")
Anyway, I don't want to support that structure. I want life to be more interesting than that.
How about we just start valuing readers more? No matter who they are and what they read (unless it's, y'know, all celebrity memoirs and crazy polemics).
AND I didn't mean to start posting about this, and there is a lot more to be said, so I will stop… NOW. As my brain is tired, and I have no idea how much sense I'm making. There's an important lesson to be learned here and it is:
Do not take sudafed after 5 p.m. This is as important as not getting the mogwai wet or feeding it after midnight.
p.s. The Hunger Games features a girl protag, a love triangle (which gets some serious page time) and a PLETHORA of makeover scenes, along with rip-roaring pacing and elaborate world-building and plenty of serious issues. Yet it's not much of a mystery that it appeals to both girls and boys; the packaging tells you it appeals to both. That more boys don't feel they can pick up, say, Ally Carter's Heist Society, which I bet lots of Hunger Games fans would love, is just disappointing. There's no reason it couldn't be packaged in a way to make that more likely.
ETA again: Check out the comments. And one little point from a comment of mine that I feel I should have made in this incredibly unfocused post:
Why women read so much more fiction than men is an intriguing question and I'd love to have more data about the reasons why that might be. Basically, I see a lot of people talking about the boys' reading crisis as if publishing is creating it and publishing can fix it and I think that's wrong. The problem is a cultural and educational system one, imo. A couple of interesting links to that point: http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/473 and http://www.hepg.org/blog/38. Because reading is only one part of the picture–the root problem is boys not doing as well academically pretty much across the board. And there are plenty of girls not being served well by the system either.
Part of what makes this such a complicated thing to discuss is that it's not one thing. We're talking about a whole bunch of different issues around gender and reading, perception vs. reality, etcetera, etcetera. The boy crisis is one thing, how certain kinds of books get marginalized by dint of being–either in reality or in perception–for girls and women is another, and how packaging can influence who reads a book yet another. And there's plenty more where those came from.
Re: what to blog about – did you see this post (via Jenny D) about being creative vs famous? Lots of food for thought. (I’m going to blog about it in the next day or so I imagine.)
http://peterterzian.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/50-foot-wave-sally-is-a-girl/
Sadly, your points are right but they’re also dangerously wrong. No one is saying that boys shouldn’t be more adventurous. There are SO FREAKING MANY books written by women, featuring women protags, that would appeal to boys. No question. And boys SHOULD be taught to be better readers. But everyone who makes these suggestions ignores two things.
1. Boys and girls ARE different. Nature, nurture, I don’t know. But boys and girls are different. Will some boys enjoy the same books as girls? Yeah. I did. I read Ramona Quimby the same as I read The Great Brain. However, I was still drawn more to books that featured things I liked: Politics, intrigue, violence. I don’t know why. And there are female writers who do this so well. I recently read Rock, Paper, Tiger. So freaking cool. But to call giving boys what they want pandering is ridiculous and it ignores the fundamental that exist. Should we force all girls to read westerns and military books at the same time as we shove vampire romance books at boys? No, right? That would be silly. People should be allowed to read whatever they freaking want. If boys are drawn to certain kinds of books, all we’re doing by telling them they should seek other books is telling them that what they want isn’t important. The things boys like, comics and graphic novels, for example, have been made taboo. They’re looked down on as not real literature in the same way that many women’s books are looked down on. ALL books have value. ALL books should be treated equally. And both boys AND girls should get to read what they want. There are some boys who will read anything and everything. There are some who won’t. The same goes for girls. There are some girls who will never read sports books and I’m okay with that.
2. A huge part of the reason boys won’t cross the so-called gender lines has nothing to do with whether they’d like a book or whether they’re biased against it, and everything to do with the social stigma of reading such books. It’s a sick, pernicious cycle, but it exists and ignoring it doesn’t do anything to help the problem. I used to tear the covers off of the fantasy books I loved so much when I was in middle and high school because I would get picked on and taunted if the cover even remotely resembled something feminine. It’s ridiculous and cruel and totally effed up, but it’s a reality. Since girls are the market for YA right now, books are being marketed to them. Books that would absolutely appeal to boys are being put into covers that appeal to girls. Now, there’s nothing inherently bad or wrong about that. But it alienates the boys who want to read them, not because girls have less value or any of that nonsense, but because other boys will bully them. Ignoring this problem doesn’t teach boys about the value of women or women writers, it punishes those who might want to read them by ensuring that either they wont’ read the book at all or that they’ll be bullied if they do.
It would be swell if we could make boys different. I see hope in the future, in my nephews who are being taught not to overvalue masculine qualities. And I hope that by the time those boys are old enough to read YA, they won’t face the same issues I did and that boys today face, but for the time being, scolding boys for not reading books written with girls in mind, packaged for girls, and marketed at girls, doesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes them farther away.
On 1) I immediately run into a problem when we discuss boys and girls as if the words alone denote some monolithic entities. There are lots of different types of boys and girls. Girls and women tend to read lots of fiction–we should celebrate that, because celebrating it actually doesn’t take anything away from boys or those who want to encourage boys to read more of it. I’m not saying pretend culture doesn’t exist; I’m saying boys will read lots of things we say they won’t if it’s presented in the right context, making it more socially acceptable.
2) Who is scolding boys for not reading? If anything, I see people recommending that we bend over backwards to make sure boys are comfortable and cheerlead for whatever they want to read.
I actually think I’m saying the same thing you are here, which is that we put these books in these little packages that limit their audiences–it’s the packaging that can turn a book that would appeal to both boys and girls, like Ally Carter’s Heist Society, into a book that will mainly be picked up by girls. There is nothing wrong with having a readership of entirely girls, obviously, but most authors want their books to reach the widest audience possible. The Hunger Games has some elements that could be perceived as incredibly “girly” (but Katniss’ trajectory is very artfully balanced between makeovers! and action!) and certainly Peeta is not the typical boy to be the love interest or in an adventure story either. But the packaging and the cultural message surrounding those books was that they were cool for boys to read too. So they did.
Take Sarah Rees Brennan’s Demon’s Lexicon series as another example. There is no reason boys wouldn’t love those. And yet they are packaged (or at least they were initially) so as to discourage boys from touching them.
Publishers are missing an opportunity in not doing a better job of identifying books that have the potential to appeal to boys and girls, and instead overdesigning lots of books to ensure they only ever find the primary audience of girls/women. And we know that girls/women will read lots of kinds of books, regardless. So I get why they do it, I do. I just think it’s counterproductive.
And to Maureen’s point, let’s all stop assuming that any book that’s designed with a frilly, “girly” cover is fluff without substance–especially since that assumption is based at least in part on the fact that mainly girls/women are the readership. That readership is not lesser.
Why women read so much more fiction than men is an intriguing question and I’d love to have more data about the reasons why that might be. Basically, I see a lot of people talking about the boys’ reading crisis as if publishing is creating it and publishing can fix it and I think that’s wrong. The problem is a cultural and educational system one, imo. A couple of interesting links to that point: http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/473 and http://www.hepg.org/blog/38. Because reading is only one part of the picture–the problem is boys not doing as well academically pretty much across the board. And there are plenty of girls not being served well by the system either.
Oh, and thanks for stopping by — I always like to see a thoughtful comment like this. (Although clearly I don’t think I’m wrong. ::smile:: I do think I was sort of unfocused, off-the-cuff rambling, which is not always the best for complicated topics.)