Ready for this one? The Slate article, The Little Men Who Love Little House – Why boys like girls books. By Emily Bazelon contains in its look at boys’ reading a full attack on librarians and their role in why boys don’t like reading! I kid you not!
“The blame partly lies with librarians. They are mostly women, they tend to love stories, and they also have a thing for books that teach moral lessons.”
“Librarians and teachers often look down on boy humor or nonfiction, and their disdain seeps through to the boys who crave those things.”
I find this entirely offensive. I definitely do not look down on boy-friendly titles. I have Captain Underpants, a nonfiction section filled with dinosaurs, snakes, and biographies, adventure fiction, and a great love of Harris and Me, which I consider one of the funniest books ever written. And I am not the exception when it comes to children’s librarians, I am the rule. There is no disdain here nor is there any need for a moral lesson in a book. Besides, shouldn’t the author of the article have looked as some books published in the last decade? If she had, maybe she would have actually visited a library and discovered that we aren’t all pinch-faced women with rulers all set to smack little boy hands.

The New York Times has a wonderful article about the new type of books for teen girls: Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things. Naomi Wolf critiques (justly and decisively) the Gossip Girl, A-List and Clique series. This is a must-read article for librarians who have these books in their collections. I am not saying that we should pull the books from our shelves, I certainly am not. But we should know what we are offering children and why their parents may have objections beyond the sexual content. That said, teens are reading and if they weren’t reading this type of trash then they would be reading adult trash novels. I definitely did as a teen.