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.