r u thr gd? its me max

Today's Publishers Weekly online had a fun little editorial by Max Leone, 13, of New Jersey: read this b4 u publish

I found parts of it very clever:

Finally, here is what I consider the cardinal rule of writing for young adults: Do Not Underestimate Your Audience. They actually know a lot about what's going on in politics. They will get most of the jokes you expect them not to. They have a much higher tolerance for horror and action than most adults.

(The only problem with this statement was that Max then went on to say that most of what he reads isn't aimed at a YA audience in the first place, making me wonder why PW picked him to talk about writing and marketing books for YA boys.)

Other parts I found downright laughable:

“Methinks”? “Doth”? Really? So we are constantly ridiculed for “lol,” while these offenses go unnoticed? To all writers of books aimed at teenage boys, I beg you: please use only modern language, no matter what time period or universe your book takes place in.

(Methinks Max needs to read Octavian Nothing, or perhaps learn a little about the evolution of the English language.)

Regardless of what I felt, it's always nice to see a teen speak passionately and articulately about reading. I don't think this piece defines what really does or doesn't make a YA book sell and garner readers and fab reviews, but it does touch on some important points.

The best book no kid wants to read

The article everyone in the YA and children's lit world is talking about lately is Has the Newbery lost its way?, by Anita Silvey in the October SLJ. I read the article, and I read Melissa's response to it at Librarian by Day, and I read Monica Edinger's thoughts on the Newbery's relevance, and Roger Sutton's entry, titled Going for the Gold, and Nina Lindsay's response at Heavy Medal.

After reading all of these, I went back and reread the Newbery criteria, and after mixing it all together in my head and baking at 350 degrees I have the following:

1. Why do we care about whether kids like the Newbery books? It's not the committee's charge to pick books kids will like.

2. Isn't Ranganathan's second law "To every book its reader?" Whether a book has millions of readers or fifty, there is a reader for every book out there. Why does it have to be liked, or resonate with a huge number of people, to contribute to the genre? I don't particularly like the Beatles, but I do admit they contributed to the rock genre in important ways.

3. Clearly, we're not doing a good enough job not just educating the public, but educating our fellow librarians, about what the Newbery and the Printz are given for. Personally, I like to say that the Newbery and the Printz are given to works of art, books that stand apart and make us rethink what a children's or YA book can be. The Newbery is given to a book "for which children are a potential audience," which by my interpretation means that the Newbery people have always acknowledged that not all kids will lurve a Newbery winner. Potential, not absolute, not guaranteed. I think the use of the word "potential" shows that the Newbery committee does understand the diversity of children and their reading habits and that no one book will ever speak to all children. Except maybe Holes.

4. One of the things I like best about my job is that I get to talk about YA books with other adults and not be thought of as strange. I think there's extreme value in adults, looking at books published for children and teens, bringing their adult perspectives and experiences to a discussion about said books. It's why I pushed so hard for Octavian Nothing when it came up at the BCCLS Mock Printz in 2007. I thought it was the perfect book to demonstrate why the Printz is given. It was a work of art, chronicling an adolescence that was completely unfamiliar to most teens.

What did I hear at the discussions? "It was too hard to get through." "My kids wouldn't read it." "I didn't understand it." Now, all of these are perfectly legitimate reasons for not adding a book to your collection, where circ stats are key to knowing how you're going to develop your collection in the future. But for an award? I knew the minute I read it that given the Printz criteria and the committee's charge, that it would take an honor for that year if it didn't win the whole thing. Why? Because the Printz criteria, like the Newbery criteria, has nothing to do with how much the intended audience loves a book.

5. In general, I think Silvey's muchly-flawed article wants us to believe that the Newbery committee has a job to do that is not, in fact, in their charge. It is not the job of the Newbery committee to pick the book that will stay a favorite with generations of children. It is not the job of the Newbery committee to make sure that those small-town kids will love the Newbery winner. It is not the job of the "too many experts" on the Newbery Committee to pick the year's most perfect book for children.

Winning the Newbery Medal does not mean a book will automatically be loved or even remembered, or that all children should read it. (Why would anyone make such a ridiculous statement, that "every child" should read ANY given book, Newbery winner or not?) It means that in one particular year, that book made the most outstanding contribution to literature for children. Here's hoping school assignments catch up to that.

Catcher in the Rye: Does it Speak to us anymore?

The children's and YA blogosphere is alive with mentions of an article in Good Magazine: Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldn't Still be Learning Catcher in the Rye. As always, I am most interested in the comments.

One of the comments says that "no other book can resonate with adolescents" as well as Catcher. Every comment in one way or another says that the list of suggested books to replace Catcher, which includes Speak and American Born Chinese, is lame and ridiculous and all the characters are completely unrelatable to today's teens because it's not relevant to the commenters or their kids or the teens they know. Of course, you all know my response to that: The plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence." Beyond all that, I have one question for all the commenters:

One would never teach history and ignore events that happened after 1955. One would never teach science and stop at discoveries made after 1955. Music history doesn't stop with John Cage. Film studies classes include Fellini and Hitchcock, but they also include the Coen brothers. Given all this, why do you deem it all right and even a best practice in education, to not teach literature with teen protagonists written after 1955?

I have never understood this need to teach classics and only classics and classics all the time. In fact, I don't think Holden Caulfield is more or less relatable than most other protagonists in literature with teen characters. I can't speak for anyone else, but I am a middle-class white girl who never saw New York until she was 17. I went to public school (I know, the horror!) and couldn't fathom having a roommate, money to travel to a big city, or a little sister who I thought was the coolest thing ever. Sure, there were parts of Catcher's narrative I liked but overall I thought Holden was making much ado about nothing.

Could I relate to Holden Caulfield? Not really.

Could I relate to Melinda Sordino, another middle-class white girl who was anything but popular and privileged? You betcha.

I went to one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in Illinois. There were students from about 55 countries that spoke as many languages. One thought nothing of walking down the halls and hearing everything except English being spoken. It was commonplace to look into the cafeteria and see Indian kids sitting with Korean kids sitting with Polish kids. My best friend from elementary school through college was fluent in English, Spanish, and Thai, and she was not unusual among my classmates in terms of languages spoken. Could many students relate to Jin Wang in American Born Chinese? Yes.

I realize that not all high schools are the same and in fact, I realize that my high school was an anomaly in terms of diversity. But that doesn't change my question of teaching modern teen literature. Why isn't English held to the same standards as history and science? Don't tell me that the world of literature doesn't change. It does, and it changes as much as history and science do, and in ways just as important. Literature is a reflection of the world we live in, and trust me, the world of teens has changed a bit since 1955. I'm not saying that Catcher is a bad book or that it shouldn't be taught, but it's not the be-all end-all of books with teen protagonists. I admire Salinger's ability to create characters and I like a good number of his books now that I'm an adult. The teen character in a high school literature classroom, though, deserves modernization. In terms of basic humanity and self-discovery, Holden does ask some of the same questions modern teens ask: Can I keep up with my changing and increasingly imperfect world? Where do I stand between childhood and adulthood? I think, however, that rather than proving that Holden needs to stand alone, above today's YA literature, his journey and self-discoveries mean that he stands among other great books that explore similar subjects, have teen protagonists, and were written after 1955.

Old books are not always bad books and new books are not always good books. As the world of literature expands every year, just like the worlds of science and history and math and the arts, it is paramount that we acknowledge its changes and encourage students to examine them. If Catcher does that for students, that's great, but that doesn't mean Speak and American Born Chinese and yes, even a (gasp) television show like Freaks and Geeks won't.

P.S. I hated Heart of Darkness in high school, and I still hate Heart of Darkness now.

Read it like you mean it

When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think "all-nighter") and the teacher, who'll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.

This, and the rest of it, a thousand times yes.

Sometimes I think that the hardest part of being a YA librarian is not reaching teens, but reaching teachers, parents, and school administrators who don't know anything about modern YA lit, refuse to learn about it, and see no value in it. Analyzing any book to death does the reader, the writer, and the teacher no favors, but when my youngest sister raided my room for copies of her assigned English books when she was in high school, I had to sigh. She's ten years younger than I am. Also, a true story: When she was in sixth grade, her class was assigned The Dark is Rising and the class had to write an analysis of every page of the book. Every. Page. No wonder she and her friends "hated" it.

Here's another true story: When I was in high school, I was what one might refer to as a reluctant reader. I didn't mind finding books on my own at the public library, and there were books I found on my own that I loved, like What's Eating Gilbert Grape?. All through high school and into college, however, I felt endlessly frustrated by what I had to read. It wasn't that I couldn't understand it, though there was certainly some of that, it was that I always felt like I could never give the teacher the answer he or she wanted to hear. If I didn't analyze the text "correctly," I would get a lower grade. None of my teachers had books in their classrooms other than the ones their classes were assigned. No books but the ones we were assigned were ever discussed in the classroom. I'll never forget reading The Great Gatsby sophomore year. Now, this was a book I actually quite liked once I got past the first chapter. But my most distinct memory was of my teacher reading to us the passage where Daisy is upset that sometimes she misses thinking about the longest day of the year, and he looked up and said to the class, "Isn't that superficial?"

I knew then that I would never make it as an English major in college. Personally, I look forward to the longest day of the year and thought as a sophomore in high school, and still think to this day, that there are many worse things to be upset about missing. I also have distinct memories of taking quizzes on the required reading for my education classes, and getting lower grades because I read the text but interpreted it differently than my professor wanted me to. Yeah, college was hell.

Sure, there's value in analyzing a text. It teaches us to look beyond the simple words on a page and see an author's thoughts about humanity. But there is also value in not reading the same book year after year, in using age-appropriate books that will speak to teens as human beings, not just as minds to analyze a text and take a test on it. There is value in classic books, and there is value in YA lit. There is a time and a place for analysis, and a time and a place for simply enjoying a novel. Maybe one day the majority of high school classrooms will educate their students about this balance.

Summer reading is killing teens

Darn. I was going to blog about this exact topic, and ShelfTalker beat me to it. It's a brilliant blog entry, really, so I will just add a few comments of my own. ShelfTalker says:

The best summer reading lists, I believe, should include a solid mix of books published for young adult readers and books published for adults, with an emphasis on ENJOYING reading. I think lists should include books that will appeal to reluctant readers AND books that will catch the eye of those kids who genuinely seek a challenge (or who just want to impress college admissions counselors). A list NEEDS to include newer books and (really, truly) the lists need to include a brief summary and/or review.

This is one hundred percent true, and if I may, I'd like to add a few summer reading list requests of my own. A great summer reading list, imho, should also have:

1. Books about people of all different colors, social backgrounds, and nationalities, preferably ones published after 2000. Not that I don't love Things Fall Apart, but can we get Chanda's Secrets on there, too?

2. A book 150 pages or shorter, and a book 500 pages or longer.

3. An equal balance of male and female main characters, and those characters should be treated as equals. One of the most egregious insults I ever saw on a summer reading list was a list that had books covering health topics. In these books, all of the boys were heroes who were "coping with" a family member's mental illness, and all the girls were mentally ill. I don't even know if the person putting the list together noticed this. Noting that the NIH says that men are more likely to suffer from mental illness than women, I suggested that the school add Under the Wolf, Under the Dog and A Beautiful Mind to start. I don't think they ever did, though.

4. Books that have the word "fuck" in them. No, I'm serious, and this is where my lack of ever being a school librarian shows. I think there's a lot to be learned from the structure of Fight Club, the way Palahniuk plays with the narrator's identity and the graying lines between order and chaos. But it's got a lot of grit and swearing, so one is unlikely to see it on a summer reading list. But come on. What reluctant reader sixteen-year-old boy, if he had to read something during the summer, wouldn't want to read Fight Club? Strong language is a way of life, and it can be a way of great writing.

5. Science fiction and fantasy...wait for it...written by women. If I'm lucky, I'll sometimes see The Mists of Avalon on a summer reading list, and that's it for speculative fiction written by women. Everything else seems to be Asimov, Clarke, Card, etc. Those books aren't bad, but a list that doesn't include fantasy and SF written by women doesn't send a great message. Please, if you're reading this and one of your jobs is to assign summer reading titles, consider books by Octavia Butler, Mercedes Lackey, Robin McKinley, J.K. Rowling, Nancy Farmer, Holly Black and Annette Curtis Klause, to name a few.

6. Books with gay characters. You know where this is a problem? Middle school reading lists. Fact is, it's 2008 and kids are becoming sexually aware earlier and earlier, even knowing they're gay or lesbian in middle school. Please, middle schools of the world, would you consider adding Alex Sanchez's So Hard to Say to your reading lists?

7. Non-linear structures and non-narrative language. Books written in IMs. Books written in diaries, letters, and emails. Books that alternate narrators. This is a multitasking generation. Shake things up a little!

8. Popular fiction. Oh yes, I went there. Maybe I'm not cut out to put summer reading lists together, but I believe all reading is good reading. As I've told some reluctant readers, finding the right book is like finding the right pair of jeans. Sometimes you have to try on 5 or 6 before you find one that's the perfect fit for you. And we all know teens are heavily influenced by their friends, so why not add the books their friends are reading, whether it's Scott Westerfeld or Janet Evanovich?

I'm a little worried by the ShelfTalker commenter who thought Lurlene McDaniel's Prey was "a surprisingly good, realistic, and non-exploitive(!!) look at a predatory female teacher," because I found Prey to be the exact opposite of all of those things (and not just because Boy Toy was my favorite book of '07), but other than that the comments on that entry are fantastic.

I didn't blog yesterday because I was tired from being in line for my new iPhone since 5 a.m., so I think the next entry will have to be How Do I Love My iPhone 3G, Let Me Count the Ways.