Reading

Ten Most Challenged Books of 2011

| Tasha

ALA has released their list of the top 10 most challenged books in 2011.  There were 326 challenges reported to ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.  I’m intrigued about the changes in the list this year: no Harry Potter, no Tango Makes Three. 

Here, just in time for the 30th Anniversary of Banned Books Week are the top ten:

   

  1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
    Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
  2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
    Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
  3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
    Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence

  

 

4.  Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

5.  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint

   

7.  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit

8. What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit

9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit

10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Reasons: offensive language; racism

Parents and E-Book Sharing

| Tasha

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This summer, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center did a survey about parents habits in sharing e-books with children.  Their focus was specifically on families who had iPads, since that has emerged as the dominant device for books for children.  The entire study is worth a read, but here are some facts pulled from it:

  • Of parents who own an iPad, 72.5% of them have read e-books with their children.
  • Parents who did not share books on their iPad had a much stronger preference for print books.
  • 89.9% of parents who share e-books with their children reported that they read mostly print books.  Only 7.5% said they read the same amount of print and e-books with their children and 2.7% said they exclusively read e-books together.

I think that children’s books will prove a tough nut to crack for publishers.  Do you make the books interactive?  Is a book filled with videos and things to click on still a book in parents’ eyes?  Or do you convert over just the format of the print volume?  Aren’t opportunities being lost there? 

How do you feel about e-books and small children?  Are you a parent who shares e-books or not? 

55% of YA Books Purchased by Adults – Updated and Corrected Below

| Tasha

Publisher’s Weekly has the results from Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age, an ongoing study from Bowker Market Research.  The trends seems to be affected by the recent blockbuster films and series like The Hunger Games, but also goes well beyond those:

“Although bestsellers lead, there’s a long tail of rich reading that has interesting implications for the publishers of YA books in terms of discovery and consumer relationships,” said project editor Kristen McLean.

Adult readers of teen books appear to also have the most valuable of traits to publishers.  They are early adopters of e-books but willing to purchase a book they want in either print or digital format.  They are loyal to the authors they love and they are active on social networks and get reading recommendations from their friends.

Sounds like a lot of the folks I know online and in person who read these books.

UPDATE:  Thanks to a tweet from @ScottWesterfeld, I realized that I misunderstood the study results.  55% of BUYERS of YA books are adults while 28% of sales are to adults.  Of those, 22% are reading the books themselves.  My apologies!

Children and Teen Reading Rates Falling

| Tasha

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The National Literacy Trust conducted a survey of 21,000 children and teens in the UK about their reading habits.  In 2005, four out of ten children read daily.  That has fallen to three in ten. 

What I find most troubling about the survey results is that one in five children said that they rarely or never read in their own time.  17% of the children even said they would be embarrassed to be seen reading by their friends.  Scary that! 

Even genres you might think would be continuing in their popularity are falling.  Magazine reading fell by 20% since 2005 with only 57% of children reading magazines.  Even more surprising is the comic reading dropping to 50% from the 64% in 2005.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, gives the following statement:

We believe we need to inspire a new generation to read in the same way that the Olympics is inspiring a new generation to take part in sport.

We need to make reading irresistible. We want to call on families and professionals working with children and young people to make ten minutes in their day for reading.

This is about carving out reading time yes, but it is also about getting the right books into the hands of children.  It’s about allowing them to read about their own interests, taking them to the library to explore those interests, and getting out of the way.  We have to let go of what books are best for them and just get them turning pages.  Quality will follow.  I promise.

The same is true of adults, who need to read what they love (even if that is children’s and teen books) so that they can model reading for the children in their lives.  If reading is good for youth, it’s just as good for us!

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightlyeverything/

Reading to Babies

| Tasha

The Guardian has news of a British survey by ICM and the Fatherhood Institute on behalf of Booktrust.  The study was done with more than 500 parents of infants participating. 

They found that 64% of parents were not reading to their babies at 7 months old and that 57% did not own a single book. 

Booktrust provides families with a pack of free books via their Bookstart program.  Happily, 75% of families started sharing books with their babies as soon as they received their free books. 

The Booktrust program is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week.  Booktrust gives books to 3 million children a year in the UK with 30 million titles having been given away since 1992.

Rating Teen Reads – A Rant

| Tasha

No, this isn’t about me starting a system on my blog to rate the books I read with a series of stars.  Instead it’s about the insidious suggestion by Brigham Young professor, Sarah Coyne, that books for teens should have rating labels on them.  It’s enough to make my librarian skin crawl.

Coyne checked teen novels for profanity in five different categories.  All but five of the books she looked at had at least one instance of profanity.  (Though I must point out that “hell” and “damn” are included in her list of profane words.)

First, let me say that I’m opposed to labeling books at all.  But really, profanity??  Not sexual acts, not violence?  But instead the damns and the hells and the transient but powerful words we use to express emotions?  What the…

Second, I have to relate my own story of reading a Judy Blume book.  I loved Judy Blume as a pre-teen and read book after book by her in a single summer.  I found Deenie and loved the storyline of a girl who wanted to be a model and had to deal with being in a back brace.  But as a younger reader, I completely (and I mean completely) missed the section on masturbation.  I missed it so thoroughly that when I later heard about that being in the book, I was confused and baffled.  I reread it as a teenager, and by golly, there it was!

No labels necessary, no parent needing to intervene.  Books are special that way.  They are patient, waiting for you to be the right age and then they change along with you.

And for those of you who think that the four letter words are different, I was an voracious reader and still needed to have someone on the school bus draw what the F-word meant.  Then I got to teach her the medical terms my mother used for those parts of the body.  We all learned something that day.

Another wrinkle is what we do with the adult books that teens are also reading.  I read Stephen King as a teen, hauling his huge tomes along with me.  I read adult romance novels that my mother didn’t approve of at all and that the librarians in my small town library also frowned at but let me check out.  I read Ivanhoe, Gone with the Wind, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and any book that caught my fancy.  And I would have read them despite any labels, and perhaps even because of labels.

And what happened to me?  I became a lover of books, a librarian, a book blogger, and a mother who would let her teenage son read anything that he wanted.  Labels or not, he can read it.  Just like I did.  If it makes him into a reader, especially one who takes risks and learns about the way others think and feel, then I say: Hell Yes!

Fairytales Are Too Scary?!

| Tasha

  

A study sponsored by the television channel Watch shows that modern parents are resistant to sharing traditional fairy tales with their children. 

It doesn’t surprise me at all that one in five read modern books rather than Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.  But in the list that follows, the reasons are bizarre to me:

1. Hansel and Gretel – Storyline about two abandoned kids is thought likely to scare children

2. Jack and the Beanstalk – Deemed too ‘unrealistic’

3. Gingerbread Man – Parents uncomfortable explaining gingerbread man gets eaten by fox

4. Little Red Riding Hood – Deemed unsuitable by parents who must explain a girl’s grandmother has been eaten by a wolf

5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – The term ‘dwarves’ was found to be inappropriate

6. Cinderella – Story about a young girl doing all the housework was considered outdated

7.Rapunzel – Parents were worried about the focus on a young girl being kidnapped

8.Rumpelstiltskin – Parents unhappy reading about executions and kidnapping

9.Goldilocks and the Three Bears – Parents say it sends the wrong messages about stealing

10.Queen Bee – Deemed inappropriate as the story has a character called Simpleton

Out of the 2000 parents polled, one quarter of them would not “consider reading a fairytale to their child until they had reached the age of five, as they prompt too many awkward questions.” 

Here is where I begin to tear my hair out.  The entire point of fairy tales and folk tales is that they touch on darkness and evil just enough to get a good scare going but not enough to terrify.  A good chase by a giant down a beanstalk and the frantic chopping to save yourself.  Rapunzel’s incredible hair and then the blinding of the prince in the thorny bushes below.   Hansel and Gretel shoving that witch into her own oven and then the final step of latching the oven door. 

I love all of it.  I used to read my book of Grimm’s stories over and over again, and it had stories that were even more strange and alarming that I loved even more.  I adored The Goose Girl with its grizzly ending.  Snow White and Rose Red was another favorite that I loved because of the circular nature of the story and the blooming roses.  The strange Clever Elsie and other tales about wisdom and foolishness, I found captivating.  Thumbelina was one I turned to many times with its enchanting flowers and fairies counterpointed with the mole and darkness.

So what do you think?  Are the stories too dark for our modern children?  Was I just a rather strange young child to adore them so?  And if you too have a love for Grimm and Andersen, what were your favorite stories?

Modern Children Can’t Read Dickens?

| Tasha

As we head towards the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin makes the claims below:

"The only caveat I would make is that today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity."

This caught my eye because my son who is a high school freshman just completed an intensive reading of A Tale of Two Cities in his English class.  Even better, the kids voted on what book to read and they chose Dickens! 

For me, it’s all about allowing children to read what they want to read when they are young, and then they will be ready for Dickens.  But it’s that reading piece that is vital, whether it’s great literature or not.

Digital Future for Picture Books

| Tasha

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Photo credit to goXunuReviews.

The Shatzkin Files is one of my go-to blogs for information on e-books.  I appreciate that his point of view is not one of librarians, but instead looks with from the point of view of someone in the publishing industry. 

A recent article on his blog talks about the challenges of bringing highly illustrated and children’s books to e-books.  This is something I have also been wondering about.  I see business books, adult fiction, and even teen fiction working well on e-books, but it seems that picture books are being transformed into apps rather than e-books. 

The layout itself is a challenge because with e-books the size of the text changes to match the settings on the device.  Add illustrations that that becomes immensely more complicated to manage.

Here is one of Shatzkin’s paragraphs that speaks to children’s books, but the entire article is definitely worth reading, especially if you are a librarian trying to figure out how e-books are changing things:

I have been asking publishers about sales of their children’s and illustrated trade material. I haven’t found anybody yet that says they’re going well. On the children’s side, where there have been pockets of success, the one Big Six digital executive who expressed an opinion to me felt that price was killing sales for the ebook versions of successful franchises. Children’s apps from such distributors as Touchy Books are priced quite low, generally $2.99 and less. But many branded titles like Eloise are $9.99 and $12.99 and up! This executive points out that paying that price for a novel you will spend many hours with is much less painful than paying it for a children’s book your kid will work through in 15 minutes or less.