Teenagers Reading

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The Future of Reading

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To continue on the theme of reading books, the March issue of Incite, the news magazine of ALIA, the professional association for librarians and other information professionals, had the theme “The Future of Reading.”

I wrote an article about what the teenagers I interviewed for my research thought about reading, seeing as they are our future. While I had some difficulty sticking to the word limit of 800, there’s a space at the end of the published article (for an ad they didn’t have a taker for) and I could have filled that space with more words, like quotes from the kids. My proof reader Gaby Haddow suggested I delete one quote to get closer to the word count but I could have put multitudes more in. eg.

That book was hell good.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne Despite my friend reading my article and telling me he’d just discovered teenagers didn’t read, one kid did say the above, I think about The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (David Fickling Books, 2006). I agree with said kid’s opinion on that book. It was an assigned text for their Year 10 English class. There weren’t fun books like that when I was at school, but it wasn’t published back then. A number of the other assigned texts teenagers discussed were studied in my English classes 20 years ago. I understand some of them are classics, but The Cay by Theodore Taylor (Doubleday, 1969) is not a classic. Well, if it is, it’s one of the boring ones.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins My parents like to read what I’ve published, but I think they get a bit bored sometimes. My mum said this one was a lot easier to read because it didn’t have annoying references getting in the way (and I’m sure the length helped, shorter always being better).

All the authors in this issue had to say what they were reading. I was reading Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins and despite my article saying I was reading Catching the Fire, I know what the title is. Katniss started a fire, she didn’t catch one, and I highly recommend the story of her fire, but you should read bk1 first. I’m looking forward to bk3 Mockingjay, released the day before my b.day.

Citation

Snowball, Clare (2010) Teenagers: Our future readers Incite, 31(3), p.13.

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Written by ClareSnow

20 March 2010 at 10:10 am

Word and Image

with 4 comments

I previously blogged about whether reading a graphic novel is equivalent to reading a conventional book. Some of the teenagers I talked to thought this wasn’t the case, but most of the librarians agreed it was – striving through their work to ensure young people encountered a variety of genres and formats in their reading, without making judgements on supposed “quality.”

misc Pilgrim ?! by Bryan Lee O'Malley I asked every group of teenagers what they would think if graphic novels were assigned as an English class text. Some teenagers thought this would be an “easy” option and it was the visual component which led to their demotion of the format as a “legitimate” text. These teenagers also happened to be those who had limited experience of the format. (Names have been changed to ensure confidentiality.)

Fourteen year old Anna believed,

People would choose the graphic novel without like thinking about it cause they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just a comic, it’ll be easy.’ But they won’t like think about like what you have to do. And they’ll just be like, ‘Oh it’s a change. And do that.’

Marty (age 14) said, “They’re not really books” and Jeremy (age 14) agreed, conjecturing that studying a graphic novel would compare unfavourably to a conventional book because it could not be studied it in depth.

That’s why we read more thorough books like The Red Cardigan [1] and stuff.

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Written by ClareSnow

24 November 2008 at 2:17 pm

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