Look on just about any surface you care to glance at in our
house, you’ll see a book.
There’ll be comic books. Books from the school library.
Books form the shelves in the kids’ rooms, or the shelves in the basement.
Books get abandoned like dirty socks in our house; sometimes
with a bookmark in them, sometimes draped open, more often than not just
sitting there, abandoned, waiting to be picked up again.
We have tablets, too. And phones. And computers. All sorts
of electronic joy. They get them confiscated once in a while for spending too
much time on them.
And once in a while, we gather all the random books left
around the house and make them put them back on the shelves where they belong.
They are, for the most part, not the kinds of books DavidDenby thinks teenagers (we have two of them, plus an 11-year-old – should be
reading.
Denby writes in The New Yorker that “serious reading” among
teens is suffering because they spend too much time with their smart phones,
their friends, and with sports and video games.
It’s a bit difficult to latch onto what Denby considers
“serious reading” to be, but there are a few snatches:
[F]ew kids are ashamed that they’re
not doing it much. The notion that you should always have a book going—that notion, which all real
readers share, doesn’t flourish in many kids. Often, they look at you blankly
when you ask them what they are reading on their own.
And this:
No more than a minority read, on
their own, J. D. Salinger or Joseph Heller or Charlotte Brontë fifty years ago;
or Kurt Vonnegut or Ray Bradbury or Allen Ginsberg forty years ago; or science
and history.
He also trots out the names Mary
Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stevenson, and Orwell.
I’m not disagreeing that these are
fine authors (I question only Salinger and Ginsberg) – but force-feeding of
such authors and their novels is part and parcel of why many look at reading
like a chore to be done, rather than something to be done for pleasure.
Any time I suggest to my kids that
they should read books I’ve enjoyed – say, John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy,
the McGurk mysteries of E.W. Hildick, or C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, I
get frowned at. Yet they’re reading voraciously, bringing home library books,
losing library books and paying library fines. Having Dad recommend a book
isn’t an automatic tell that they’re going to read it. More often than not,
they run in the opposite direction.
Denby also needs to look further
into this Pew study, where it’s revealed Millennials – that first
internet-raised generation – is actually reading MORE than those of the older
set, are more open to information that’s not from the internet and other such
interesting facts that Slate tells you all about.
Should teenagers be challenged to
read outside their comfort zone? Yes. That’s why we have the kinds of “serious”
books that Denby writes about in the house where the kids can find them. And
they do find them. I caught the sixteen-year-old reading “The Count of Monte
Cristo,” outside of any school assignment. He also read “To Kill A
Mockingbird” as part of a class assignment – and enjoyed it. There’s an art to
getting teens – anyone – to read books, as Denby outlines as he talks of
teachers challenging them with classics that fit the modern trends for dark and
dystopian. But there’s also a craft – a craft of just having a lot of good
books just lying around the house for people to read.
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