“The cover is blown on teen reading.”

That’s the title of a press release issued a month ago by the National Year of Reading, a project in Great Britain aimed at promoting reading through local events, media spots, and Web-based conversation. The press release announced the results of a survey entitled “Read Up, Fed Up” that queried 11-to-14-year-olds on their reading tastes, both the savored and the despised materials, using focus groups and Web commentaries.

The results were unsurprising.

Most loved: 1 Heat magazine 2 Bliss magazine; online song lyrics 3 Online computer game cheats 4 My own blog or fan fiction 5 The Harry Potter series 6 Anne Frank’s diary 7 Film scripts 8 Books by Anthony Horowitz 9 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis 10 BBC Online; the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books by Louise Rennison

Most hated: 1 Homework 2 Shakespeare 3 Books of over 100 pages 4 Magazine articles about skinny celebrities 5 Books assigned by school/teachers 6 Encyclopedias and dictionaries 7 The Beano 8 Music (scores); the Harry Potter series; maps/directions 9 Facebook 10 Financial Times; Anything in another language

Reasons for worry? Not many. Heat and Bliss are teen gossip rags, yes, and putting your own blog near the top is a bad sign of teen narcissism. And the “over-100-pages” limit signals a slipping attention span. But we shouldn’t expect much else from middle-schoolers. If they didn’t put homework at the head of the bad list, we should conclude that they’re not doing enough of it. Shakespeare’s language is forbidding, too, and Anne Frank shows that their attention doesn’t always go to celebrities and fashion photos.

There is a worrisome aspect of the report, though. It’s the commentary by Honor Fletcher-Wilson, Director of the National Year of Reading. She pinpoints another finding from the study: 45 percent of teenagers have been rebuked by parents for their reading preferences. NYR finds this “staggering,” a sign of “narrow definitions of what constitutes reading.” Fletcher-Wilson claims that in their choices teens aren’t expressing their adolescence — that is, the puerile tribalisms of the age group — but instead are “challenging traditional definitions of reading as being all about books. We must understand that all reading is valid, that it all counts and it must be appreciated.”

What to say about this kind of flattening, and the youth indulgence that goes along with it? Let’s step back. The “staggering” thing in this study isn’t that half the parents have told their kids to drop the tabloid and pick up a novel. No, the staggering thing is that the people leading the National Year of Reading think that a parent doing the responsible parental task, steering kids to more serious matter now and then, just don’t appreciate the “challenging” critical work the kids are engaged in.