There really no right answer. It depends on the audience. After all, for some people it’s a great play. For others, it’s a great metaphor for traditional publishing. Seriously, the perennial question of ‘why aren’t boys reading’ seems to flared up again on X and the responses are as predictable as ever.
‘Why don’t boys want to read books with girl-boss characters?’ ‘I had to put up with reading boys’ books when I was a little girl, they can just suck it up.’ ‘Why do we have cater to boy audiences?: they must be made to stretch themselves.’ ‘How do they know they don’t like girls’ books? and so on.
Anything, literally anything, except say ‘it’s not a good thing for about half our next generation just not to be reading or reading far less than other half’ (I’d be saying that, regardless of sex). For starters, for a person to happy with with their partner, shared interests are a good foundation. If you’re a reader, it’s going to be a misery in a relationship with someone who wants to talk to you while you read. And reading broadens people. You’re a fool if you want someone way under your mental level for a partner, and more than that if you want it for your kids. I want my grand-daughters to be able to find boys who read to marry and be happy with.
I don’t think anyone wants to read a book that actively denigrates them to ‘untermench’ – a problem in much modern fiction. It’s pretty stupid but if you’re waiting for Trad Pub on this, Godot isn’t coming today either. There is some fiction directed at younger male readers coming out of indy, but as this particular market sector is heavily driven ‘bought for them’ (by parents, grandparents etc.) – if it isn’t in a bookstore, it’s not being bought. Other exposure is in libraries, or as school texts… well guess what. Indy isn’t there either.
As for the ‘oh well they can just suck it up, I had to’ – the point is they’re NOT sucking it up. They simply aren’t reading at all. And if people don’t start reading for pleasure early, they usually don’t at all.
Any delusions that you can make boys like reading Sweet Valley High by forcing them to try it… is interesting. And plainly ignorant of human nature.
The ‘knowing they don’t like it’ without trying it, is a product of looking at the cover (market signals) and sampling the first (and last) pages, and blurbs. Also, reading has been transformed into ‘not cool’ for boys. And peer pressure is a big deal to MG/ Teens kids.
So… what exactly is it that boys want that is such anathema? I believe – having sampled some of the current crop, that it’s simple, and it is not just boys, but quite a lot of girls too. One word: action. Fast moving from the first page, not too much about feelings and relationships. Not too much Godot either. Straightforward, clear-cut good and evil roles, exciting settings and situations, heroes the readers like and can identify with.
Or do think they want something else?
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “Action or waiting for Godot?”
Fun, adventure, problem-solving that has a real goal, not preachy, that’s what guys seem to want to read. Heroes that they can look up to and copy, guys who get the gal, or help their buddies and gain respect and status for their efforts. You know, all-around fun books like My Side of the Mountain or Tunnel in the Sky or the original Hardy Boys novels. Of silly stuff like Alan Mendelson, Boy from Mars.
My favorite all-time book is The Three Musketeers, which I’ve read four times now. Adventure stories are still mostly what I read, just dressed up as SF/F or mystery. People doing stuff that isn’t too stupid to live is great entertainment.
I read boys books because they were about people doing interesting things, being brave, loyal, fighting for the right things. That the main characters were boys was entirely unimportant.
If the girly books had those virtues, boys probably would read them. The other stuff just wasn’t interesting. Relationship books . . . I’ve read a few. Didn’t reread.
Baen has boy’s books. It’s Up To Charlie Hardin and Changling’s Island are two examples. The Jane Lindskold Stephanie Harrington books are, too, despite a female protagonist.
My daughter really likes fantasy novels, but with quite a bit of romance thrown in. Boys generally don’t go out for romantic stories all that much.
As for the girls having been forced to read ‘boys’ books, I’m wondering exactly to which books she’d be referring to.
In grade school the books we read for class were things like Little House On the Prairie, James and Giant Peach, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH”, etc. Middle school involved The Red Badge of Courage, Where the Red Fern Grows, Harrison Bergeron, Flowers For Algernon, and the like. Looking at what my daughter has been reading for school these last few years, quite a bit of it is still the same. Some of it she loves, others she hates. Which is about par for the course with any kid I would suspect.
One of the things I noticed looking online at various Middle School reading lists is that probably about half of the books listed on any of them are books I would have read, or are on my wife’s (5th grade) shelves, in grade school. Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Wrinkle In Time, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, Runaway Ralph. Has reading really fallen that far?
I know I was unusual in my reading tastes/level when I was a kid, having read my parent’s novels in school for free reading time and book reports. My Junior High English teacher let me do my book reports on Alistair MacLean, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke novels, and The Hobbit, while my classmates were turning in Sweet Valley High, The Babysitter’s Club, Huckelberry Finn and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Maybe Flowers In the Attic or The Outsiders would pop up for the more precocious kids. But I don’t remember anyone reading Judy Blume or Beverly Cleary books in junior high.
The answer to your question in paragraph 4 is, Yes, schools have fallen that far. I taught science for twelve years and what the kids could do at the end of those years was far short of what they could do at the beginning of those years. Complete sentences? Out the window. No complex sentences at all and very few compound sentences. Their reading ability was atrocious. We teachers had an inservice on reading and it was all about how to help kids get through a book without, you know, sitting down and — reading it.
My wife is finding quite a few low readers, especially since the ‘Rona closed schools. It used to be that there were one or two that read a grade level below. Now those are almost the high readers. Some of her 5th graders are reading at a 2nd grade level.
I plead the Fifth on this one, but I do not disagree at all.
“I had to suck it up and read boys’ books”. Horsefeathers! There were a gazillion girls books starting from Betsy-Tacy and going through the Pony Club and such. And we girls could still ENJOY Tom Swift or the Jupiter Jones (forget the actual series but Hitchcock had the name) or Tarzan or Kjelgard or The Black Stallion (probably girl because horses but heckin’ adventure).
Pfeh! When I was a kid it was an awesome time for girls’ reading because politically correct reading hadn’t been invented.
Jupiter Jones was in “The Three Investigators” series. Somewhere I still have The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot & the Mystery of Terror Castle
Sigh. I read the boys books in middle school because they were chock full of adventure, courage, daring-do … all of that. Just about all (not totally all, since there were girls books with adventure, daring-do and I had devoured them) were along the lines of Betty Cavanna high-school girls coping with the mean-girl clique and yearning after some boy who might take her to the prom … puke. Puke on a galactic scale.
Yeah, I’m female, and I didn’t start enjoying books with significant romance angles until high school, with some combination of abridged Jane Eyre (GOTHIC MELLERDRAMA!), unabridged Pride and Prejudice (COMEDY!) and (fictionally abridged but actually not) Princess Bride (COMEDY AND GOTHIC MELLERDRAMA!)
(No, people, don’t tell me I should have been reading Northanger Abbey instead, I found that whole “haha, she keeps expecting gothic adventures and getting mundane high school drama instead” routine very annoying when I finally read it.)
One of the terrible things about no reading, beyond the enjoyment that kids will miss out on, is the amount of knowledge that slips in with reading. You can practically make cheese after reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of doing it and you know a calf stomach is somehow involved. Eggs are full of sulfur. We all know where that comes from.
I learned how to read so easily I don’t even remember it. When I had a son with serious dyslexia it was clear that there were two problems. One, learn to read happily, and two, keep up with all that other knowledge. My solution was to read to him until 8th or 9th grade, and even after that if he asked. We also did a lot of old Bell labs videos and Victory at Sea, etcetera. But I know from my teaching stint that this is not how a lot of people handle the problem. I’ll just say that he has a BA in physics and an MA in EE and he is reading LOTR to his dyslexic 7-year old.
The habit of reading comes at a VERY early age.
Before discovering the Heinlein juveniles (male adventure oriented), feeding my addiction had me reading the Bobbsey Twins series that one of my sisters had. I enjoyed their adventures – and that Nan and Flossie were often the “center” didn’t bother me in the least. Also the Oz books, which, if you look at them critically, had a preponderance of “girl bosses” (the two most powerful, of course, being Ozma and Glinda).
It is the action – and imagining the adventure of doing some of those things the characters are doing – that pulls in the very young reader, whatever their gender.
Oh, I still very much enjoy reading “girl boss” stories. Bujold, MGC’s own Cedar Sanderson, the women in the Manticore universe, etc., etc.
Agency. They want to make decisions that have meaningful results, even if only vicariously.
Also, they don’t want to wait too long for most of those meaningful results to manifest.
Kids have very little agency in this modern world of helicopter parents and participation trophies. They’re desperate for it.
“There is some fiction directed at younger male readers coming out of indy, but as this particular market sector is heavily driven ‘bought for them’ (by parents, grandparents etc.) – if it isn’t in a bookstore, it’s not being bought.”
This has always been one of the problems with children’s literature, and it goes hand in hand with the other one, which is that all too often it tends towards being explicitly geared towards moral formation rather than telling a cracking good story.
Why on earth adults think kids are any more enthused about being preached to than they are is beyond me.