What Do Boys Like to Read?

My last post discussed the well-recognized fact that, worldwide, boys lag girls in reading skills. Some observers place the blame for at least part of boys' underperformance on the kinds of books served up in school. According to these critics, elementary teachers and English teachers, who tend to be female, assign books that appeal to girls--fiction that focuses on character development, feelings, and literary style. Boys, say the critics, prefer humor, action, and non-fiction.

The pattern of gender differences in reading preference extends to other countries as well. With a quick scan this evening, I found:

* A study of Greek 5th and 6th graders reporting that girls preferred human-interest stories while boys preferred comics and action stories.

* A study of English secondary school students discovering that boys would rather read (and performed better on tests about) a passage on spiders than one on leaving home in wartime.

* A pair of studies from Canada claiming that boys are more interested in
"cartoons, comics, news, sports pages, science fiction and fantasy stories, hobby, craft, and special interest books."

* An Australian study showing that boys preferred mystery, fantasy, and adventure, while exhibiting a strong dislike for poetry.

What about American boys? Accelerated Reader is a program that encourages students to choose their own books and then awards points when students complete a brief quiz on the book. Points are weighted for the length and difficulty of the books read, and students are encouraged to stretch themselves. In 2007, Accelerated Reader's database of over 160,000 secondary school students reported that ten of the top twenty books chosen by boys were fantasy (with a heavy preponderance of Harry Potter books), while the other ten looked suspiciously like books assigned for class: Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, and the like. Note that no non-fiction books make the list, with the exception of A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer (which I understand has been revealed NOT to be non-fiction.)

Now, Accelerated Reader may actually distort reading choices if not enough high quality non-fiction books have been assigned points and listed. But at least one scholar has suggested that boys' choice of fantasy reveals their longing for action, invention, and heroic male characters not found in the standard school fare. This same scholar bemoans the fact that boys' "tastes and reading skills have not been developed for mature fiction, biographies, and historical nonfiction in self-selected reading."

What are we to make of all this? First, I think it's important NOT to tell boys that some kinds of reading are bad and don't count. When I was a child, my mother refused to let us read comic books. As a result, whenever we went to friends' houses I would hole up in one of their bedrooms tearing through comic books as fast as I could. It made me a boring playmate and unwelcome guest. My own son Damian read all the Calvin & Hobbes comics so many times that he could quote a fitting comic for almost any occasion; it didn't seem to damage his literacy any.

At the same time, I do think it's important to keep encouraging young readers to try new genres. In fourth grade Damian's class had a "Book Bingo" grid with spaces to fill with free choice books chosen from within a multitude of specified genres, from science fact to biography to fantasy to poetry. Damian managed to fill in four and half grids before the year was over.

Kids' magazines often have good, short informational text written in an accessible way. Boys will often follow their favorite teams in the sports pages. And an attentive parent can always keep eyes open for snippets on the Internet that might be of interest (I forward these to my sons). Another trick is to ask our sons to find something out for us on the Internet. Purists may complain about Wikipedia as a source of information, but it's certainly a source for informational reading that's more challenging and rewarding than Captain Underpants.

So look for humor, violence, heroism, mythology, action, mystery, strong male role models, science and sport stories, and a chance for boys to gain specialized knowledge. Still, let's be careful not to stereotype boys. There are some, after all, who love poetry, drama, and the subtleties of character. Let's just keep talking with them about what they're reading and strive to keep books and other forms of print a natural part of their lives.

[For previous posts on the topic, check here and here.]

Enna Burning, a Book Review

Enna Burning is the second book in the Bayern fantasy series of Shannon Hale, Newbery Honor-wining author of Princess Academy. I haven't read The Goose Girl, which is the first Bayern book, but part of what I wanted to learn from reading this one is how to handle a sequel so that it's accessible to those who haven't read the first book while not being repetitive for those who have. Hale manages this partly by focusing on a new protagonist, Enna, a forest girl who befriended the goose girl Isa (now queen) from the first book.

Enna has returned to live in the forest with her brother Leifer after the death of their mother, but she's restless for life in the larger world. Then Leifer discovers an ancient vellum telling him how to summon and control fire, and the need to burn begins to consume him. When Bayern is invaded by its neighbor Tira, Leifer's skills turn the tide of battle, but he dies in the fire. In mourning for her brother, Enna succumbs to the temptation to read the vellum herself. Soon she finds that fire is an uncontrollable addiction. Enna becomes secretive and obsessed as she breaks promises to herself, makes bigger fires, more often, and even begins to burn people alive -- all the while telling herself she's only doing what's right for Bayern.

This book has lovely descriptions and likable, complex characters. As Enna changes, so do those around her: gentle Finn becomes tougher and more manly; Queen Isa suffers from the effects of her own wind-calling power. And then there's the charismatic Tiran captain, Sileph, who captures Enna and uses drugs, loving words, and persuasion to seduce her toward despair and treason.

A great strength of Enna Burning is the freshenss of its sensory detail and the beauty of its descriptive language. The crunch of snow underfoot sounds like rodents munching; Enna's hand, as she creeps up to a Tiran camp, becomes numb touching the frosty ground. The descriptions of Enna's interactions with fire are frightening and convincing.

A novelist has to master time and space, persuading the reader she is always in control. Here Hale fares a little less well. Time in the first half of the book, especially once Enna begins her burning, moves slowly and rather aimlessly. She burns some Tiran tents; time passes; she goes out again. Meanwhile everybody else holds war councils. Clunky transitions occur: "Enna turned her back on the south and followed Isi inside to prepare for a war council, one of many that autumn." Just that suddenly, we move from a scene that reached no real conclusion to more distant narration eliding a long span of time. The same disproportion, though this is a quibble, appears in the map at the front of the book. We're told that the forest is two days' journey from the capital, while to reach the desert land of Yasid takes two months; the map shows the two distances as not that different from one another.

Once Enna falls captive in the Tiran camp, the narration picks up speed. A prisoner, unable to act for herself, Enna undergoes a fierce moral struggle. For the reader, watching Enna struggle against and succumb to Sileph's blandishments makes for painful suspense. Then, after scenes of escape and war that would serve as climax for another book, we move into a long journey to Yasid in search of healing. The resolution, while a little too neat, reaffirms the value of deep and enduring friendship.

This is a tough book, with its harrowing portrayal of addictive need and debasement. Most disturbing of all is the fact that Enna burns a lot of people alive. For some reason, even though readings expect that a fantasy may show killing in war, this grisly kind of killing, and the fact that the heroine embraces it, makes the story unusually dark. Perhaps readers will receive a good reminder that war is never all that purely heroic. Nor is the mayhem sprung on the reader without warning. Hale gives a fair taste of what's to come in the two-page prologue, which shows a fire-witch fleeing through the forest from the destruction and murder she has caused. Shannon Hale never promised us a story that was all flowers and light.

Notes from a Liar and Her Dog: a book review

Gennifer Choldenko's Notes from a Liar and Her Dog tells the story of a Ant, who is such a misfit in her family that she's certain the grown-ups she lives with are not her real parents. As the only brunette and the only troublemaker between two blonde sisters who know how to please their parents, she feels close to no one but her Chihuahua mix and her smelly, artistic classmate Harrison. As a result of her alienation, Ant hides her intelligence and good grades, lies indiscriminately, and hides her dog in her jacket pocket whenever she can.

I can't remember ever before reading fiction with such a convincingly frightful set of parents. Ant's mother betrays no patience or compassion for her unhappy child. Instead, she sees her middle daughter as almost an interloper in her otherwise happy, well-behaved family. But the veneer of family happiness is thin: all of them are tense and unsettled, waiting for their father to reject yet another job and uproot them to move to a new city once again.

Just Carol, Ant's art teacher, tries to intervene. But Ant's mother angrily rejects Carol's approaches, and when Ant is finally allowed to join Carol in volunteer work at the zoo, Ant blows her chance not once but twice.

What makes this book compelling is the strong voice of its unhappy narrator, a girl with a loving heart who makes herself as tough as she can on the outside while longing for approval and support on the inside. Despite Ant's propensity for lying, her narrative voice is frank and full of integrity. She's fighting to hold onto her sense of self among people who appear to scorn her.

The book is a masterful portrait of a warped family system, where one child has become the scapegoat for a host of family troubles. Despite the webs of deception and poor judgment Ant weaves around herself, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog suggests that people can change, and even the most painful relationships can become more rewarding with heroic effort on all sides.

This is a great book for a thoughtful kid, or even for a kid who sometimes feels maligned and misunderstood. And who doesn't feel that way sometimes? I highly recommend it for ages 9 to 14, and it might be a great conversation-starter for parents and children to read together.

Lexicon villages event

This morning I held my first full Lexicon villages event at a K-8 school in Arlington, VA. I got there half an hour early and with the help of Ellen Klein of Hooray 4 Books and the school librarian, set up the stations (Lexicon villages) on tables around the library. Teachers and parent volunteers began to arrive, and I briefed them quickly on the villages they would be supervising.

Soon about 75 children in grades 5-7 rolled in. I talked briefly about the book. When I mentioned that Aunt Adelaide allows no television, video games, computers or mp3 players in her house, one boy's eyes went so wide he looked as if he might faint. I walked the kids through the villages they'd be visiting, and then they counted off into eight groups and found their stations.

Here's what they worked on:
In Radix, they constructed words from Greek and Latin roots.
When they met Emily, they constructed synonyms for her.
In Tessellate, they worked on making images from the book with Tangrams.
At Metaphor's Hill, they wrote down meaty metaphors for the Mistress of Metaphor's pot.
In Merry Measure, they experimented with non-standard measures of length.
In Flora, they drew from lists of different parts of speech to construct a sentence.
In Irrationality, they measured circumference and diameter of round objects to come up with an estimate for pi.
In the Land of Night, they traced their way through a maze while looking at it only in the mirror.

The poor kids had to really rush. I'd say the activities that proved most difficult were coming up with metaphors and understanding the parts of speech activity. The Tangram challenges were difficult to solve, but the kids loved them, and we gave them a pattern for making their own Tangrams to take home.

Each child got a pencil, an Emily wristband, and additional activities to take home. They were excited and engaged, and the event left me with a happy feeling and at least one hug. The librarian promised to send pictures, which I will post when they arrive.

Ideally, a Lexicon event would be more of an open house, where kids and parents could circulate according to their own schedule, but the reality of school means things have to be more organized, and I was surprised how well and quickly the kids were able to work on the challenges. I'm now thinking of refinements for the next kids' event, and I've already been asked to do a Lexicon event for adults!

The Writing on the Wall, book review

Wendy Lichtman's novel The Writing on the Wall is the most recent addition to my small collection of middle grade novels with a mathematical theme. It's a well-written school story where eighth-grader Tess's fascination with mathematics plays a key role.

Tess loves math, and she likes to make mathematical analogies for people and dilemmas in her everyday lift. For example, she calls her friend Sammy "s to the fifth" becasue Sammy inflates everything and often says things five times. Miranda is "the absolute value of m" because, like the absolute value of a number, Miranda is always positive.

The plot centers around a series of mathematical clues left as graffiti on the back wall of a church across from Tess's school. The clues seem to point to a crime, and they also seem to be aimed at Tess as the one person who can decipher them. Tess, who is being tormented by a boy named Richard and needs the distraction, finds herself drawn into the mystery to the degree that she ignores a strong warning from the principal and starts writing some graffiti of her own.

So on the one hand, this is a mystery story with codes and clues. On the other hand, it's the story of a usually obedient and responsible student drawn into careless delinquency becasue of her obsession with numbers and with being in control. Consequences follow, and Tess has to do some re-thinking of her own motivation.

A real strength of this story is that the characters, adults and kids alike, are well-drawn and believable. One of the best is Mr. Z, the snide computer teacher. Tess is an observant narrator, though not, as she realizes, an intuitive one. The math she presents in this book will be clear and accessible to students in grades 5-8, and it's well woven into the story.

This is the second book about Tess and math, so the earlier one, Secrets, Lies, and Algebra, is worth checking out, too.

Schooled, a book review

Schooled, by Gordon Korman, is a middle school book with humor and heart. Cap and his grandmother Rain are the last two members of a sixties-style commune named Garland, where they live without money, television, or other trappings of the competitive, materialistic life Rain disdains. Homeschooled, Cap hardly knows any other people until the day Rain breaks her hip falling from the plum tree and he drives her to the hospital. While she’s recovering in a rehab facility, he’s taken in by a social worker and attends a school named Craverage (or, as the kids prefer, C Average) middle school.

Cap’s pacifism, trustfulness, and general naivete make him completely unprepared for the social jungle of middle school, where the cool kids immediately target him as the greatest loser ever. Bullying can get to be a tiresome theme in middle school fiction, but these bullies have some imagination: besides lodging spitballs in his long hair and leaving disgusting things in his locker, they arrange for Cap to be elected school president. Once he's elected, they continually summon him to bogus press conferences to explain how he’s going to solve class problems.

Earnest and friendly, Cap never takes offense. Told the president’s job is to learn the name of all 1100 kids in the school, he sets out to do so. He wears tie dye shirts and corn husk sandals, practices tai chi in the courtyard, endures the disgusted insults of his foster sister, and watches a TV soap opera for clues on how school really works. Before long, he starts to win other students over, but that’s before he gets hold of the student activities checkbook and starts giving away all the money meant for the Halloween dance.

The story of a naïve, good-hearted homeschooled student entering the fishbowl of public school may remind readers of Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, and with good reason, but there are differences. Cap is really something of a holy fool, transforming the people around him. Instead of having a single narrator, Schooled has multiple narrators taking different chapters: Cap, the social workerwho takes him in, her daughter, the tormentor and head jock, the former dweebiest kid in the school, a popular girl, and even the principal. Second, while Stargirl’s popularity rises and falls, Cap’s travels pretty much in one direction, without Spinelli’s overtones of loss and regret.

I know a teacher who read this book aloud to her seventh grade class. It’s a good choice. Funny, thoughtful, and cleverly observed, Gordon Korman's Schooled is well worth the time of a reader 10 to 14 years old.

Is The Runaway Bunny's Mother Overprotective?

Yesterday's NY Times parenting blog featured an article called "Children's Books You (Might) Hate." It was a provocative post, generating over two hundred comments already. It lists a number of "creepy" children's books, including "The Giving Tree," "Love You Forever," "The Rainbow Fish," and "The Runaway Bunny." I agree about the first three, but I have a soft spot in my heart for "The Runaway Bunny." Maybe it's the rich color of the illustrations.

So here's my slightly tongue-in-cheek defense of "The Runaway Bunny" as a subtle and nuanced treatise on how parental development must continue in concert with a child's growth. It's a parable of how maternal love and protectiveness have to adapt as the child's search for independence becomes more sophisticated and appropriate.

We mothers need a lot of guidance in this. I always knew that letting go was going to be one of the challenges of motherhood. A friend of mine arrived home from the hospital after giving birth, and as she carried her newborn son across the threshold for the first time, she burst into tears. She cried to her husband, "In just eighteen years he'll be leaving us!"

When the Runaway Bunny first threatens to flee, the mother bunny reassures him that she'll come after him. That's appropriate: a small child needs to know that even if he's angry or naughty, his mother will still want him and love him. A child secure in his parents' love can grow.

Then the little bunny says he'll become a trout in a trout stream. I see him as a preschooler now, leaving his home and experiencing a peer group for the first time, entering the stream of the big world. His mother says she'll become a fisherman. She'll find him among all the others: even though he's one of many children at school, he's still her special child.

He threatens to become a rock on a mountain high above her, and she says she'll become a mountaineer to climb to him. We all face the time when our children surpass us in their knowledge of baseball or computers, their skill in art or in music, or even the beauty of their ideas. Here is a mother who promises to try to keep growing to rise to her child's level.

The little bunny says he'll become a crocus in a hidden garden. He's older now; he wants his privacy, but he hasn't yet blossomed into the person he will be. She promises to be a gardener. She'll nurture him and let him grow.

He says he'll become a bird and fly away, and she says she'll be the tree that he comes home to. This is just right: she's letting him try his wings in all sorts of ways, while still providing a safe refuge.

Then, in the next stage, she makes a mistake. He's older now, perhaps entering adolescence. He wants to become a sailboat on the ocean and sail away. Perhaps she's fed up with his aimlessness. Perhaps she sees him drifting in the wrong direction. She says she'll be the wind and blow him where she wants him to go. Who among us doesn't want to do this sometimes? We try to choose our children's friends and activities, and then we try to convince them to want what we want for them - Harvard or a career in the law or a diving scholarship or the honor roll.

But after this episode of backsliding, the mother bunny gets back on track. Her son offers to fly away on a flying trapeze. By now he's really an adolescent, sulky and distant, but still needy. She resolves to become a tightrope walker, to perform the difficult balancing act of meeting him where he is.

Then, all at once, this mental and spiritual journey into the future is over, and once again he's a little bunny, wanting a hug and something to eat and a warm place to stay. The mother bunny can stop worrying about the future and just enjoy the little son she has right now.

In my reading, the mother bunny accepts that someday her son will leave. Just not yet. She knows she'll be both sad and proud when that day comes.

Word Nerd: a book review

Word Nerd, by Susan Nielsen, tells the story of a twelve-year-old misfit who finds friendship through Scrabble. Put that way, it doesn't sound exciting, but this book is a great read, with a wry eye for character and relationships.

"The day I almost died, the sky was a bright, brilliant blue--" So Ambrose begins his story. He's an awkward, nerdy boy with a mother so insanely protective that until kindergarten she made him wear a kid harness with a leash whenever they went out. They've moved from Canadian town to Canadian town, and he's made friends in none of them. Finally an inventive and ignorant trio of bullies almost kill him, and his mother decides he'll study at home through a correspondence course. (She keeps him away from computers because of the danger.)

Partly out of boredom, Ambrose becomes fascinated with his landlord's son, who has just returned from prison. Cosmo is a struggling ex-addict with a debt problem hanging over him, a foul mouth, and a lousy attitude. But mutual exploitation leads eventually to friendship between the two lost males, and their relationship is brightened and complicated by the presence of Amanda, leader of the local Scrabble club. As Ambrose the word nerd's Scrabble rankings climb, so do his social skills, his skills of self-defense, and his bravery, until a final confrontation with Cosmo's creditors threatens to ruin everything.

What makes this book so charming is the voice of Ambrose, by turns mature, resigned, childish, and deaf to social niceties. Some parents may be turned offby the seriously bad language of Cosmo and his associates, and I found Ambrose's frequent use of childish potty terms distasteful, but all in all, this story of how an unlikely friendship leads an awkward boy to self-understanding and advocacy could become a favorite of any child, and not just the word nerds among us.