My best friend's mom told her after she had read a book I had recommended, “Now you need to read something good for you."
This is the message I received about my reading early in my life. It never stopped me from reading what I wanted but it made me feel guilty about it. Reading something “good for you” is a myth that has taken me many years to eliminate in my own life. And what has helped me solidify my stance, for it is now as unmovable as the mountains, is the information I have received in my Young Adult Literature Class.
Reading Teri S. Lesesne’s book, Naked Reading, put what I knew in my heart down in black and white. All reading is good for you and “how much we read does matter” (Lesesne.3). And she has the statistics to prove it, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, kids that read forty plus minutes of outside reading everyday achieve in the ninetieth percentile in achievement and gain 2.3 million words a year (Lesesne.3). These kids were reading; not only from the classical cannon of literature but book and magazines chosen by them for whatever reason that made them sit down and read.
This is great information and an exciting revelation, but really, not all books are good….some are bad, badly written, badly plotted, just plain bad. There are badly written books in every genre but the difference is there are no bad genres. In our classroom packet, the section on “Contemporary Realistic Fiction: From Tragedies to Romances”, the discussion is put forth about the importance of a young adult books being “realistic” to be of any value to the reader: “The general public seems to have an almost subconscious belief that children will model their lives after what they read” (Donelson.114). Happy endings and fantasy elements being the main concerns for deciding if a negative value is placed on a book. The reading points out that in romances the “happy ending [is] achieved only after the hero’s worth is proven through a crisis or an ordeal” and this suffering brings with it wisdom and knowledge (Donelson.136). There is value in this description, though it is not wisdom that young adults are expected to take from any of the books they read, it is empathy. Reading should give the young adult a view point or example of a situation that they, if having not experienced themselves, can for a moment share the experience of someone else’s life and choices. This expectation when reading a book includes every genre, even fantasy: “Authors are incorporating multiple genres in their pieces as they lead readers directly from the consideration of serious everyday problems into magical realism” (Donelson.146). The fantasy or science fiction novel may include the supernatural or a world that does not exist but it brings to the reader different choices and values that they are welcomed to consider. This chapter of our packet was extremely helpful; it gave me the ability to look at every book in way that goes beyond a surface judgment to a deeper evaluation of a book’s importance to the young adult that may be reading it. And I know I just labeled some books as “bad”. I would like to clarify; young adults should read them all because reading is always good.
Now that the myth about reading “good for you” books is completely out of the way and we recognize that reading anything and everything is “good” for us: How then to make reading important and a priority in the lives of young adults?
There are many parts to this goal but I believe the overriding factor, the one thing that holds all the bits and pieces together is ENTHUSIASM. It is the glue that sticks kids and books together, without it all the reading activities, school libraries, book talks and lesson plans fall flat and fail. Adults need to be mentors for each potential lifelong reader . Lesesne had some wonderful ideas for sharing enthusiasm for books and we mirrored some of these ideas in our own class. We gave book talks, had available to us choices in reading material, and we were given a chance to share our reading. These are all powerful motivators to creating lifelong readers but it does not work without the contagious element of enthusiasm. It has to start somewhere (Thanks Dr. Adams) and then it is guaranteed to be passed along.
My favorite part of Naked Reading, was the last chapter about the “un-book report ideas”. The idea that kids today have grown up surrounded by visual elements and how you can incorporate this knowledge into book related activities. Lesesne gives the example of a chalk outline character study with words and images added to a person’s outline to represent that character’s thoughts and ideas. Another interesting activity is asking a student to judge a book’s cover before they read it and go back to it after to revaluate if the cover was affective or not. Along the same lines was the activity that we did in class, where we were asked to draw a picture to represent the major themes and emotions in a book we had just read. This was a hard activity for those of us not artistically inclined but it was very useful to think of a book’s message as a whole and try to relate that to those who had not read it. (My group’s book was Esperanza Rising. Hope represented in art.)
I have read young adult literature for many years into my adult life and I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about that particular section of the library. But this class introduced me to a number of young adult novels I have missed and in some cases, forced me to read some that I thought I would not enjoy. I have appreciated all of novels I have read this semester from, The Rules of Survival, which I thought would be too heart wrenching to bear to The Absolutely True Dairy of a Part-Time Indian, which I thought was going to be too sarcastic to enjoy. I am excited to have had my reading interests expanded and deepened and I look forward to enthusiastically doing the same for that next potential reading enthusiast: “Read!”
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