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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

What Should Boys Read?

A correspondent sent me a link to this site, which he and others run. It’s called the iPulp Fiction Library, and it offers for free online fiction in the dime-novel tradition. The titles give an idea of the genre: “There’s Nothing Under the Bed,” “The Great Egress Caper,” and “Wizard’s Boy.” The correspondent says that he thinks these books can bring more teenage boys into the reading habit.

Five years ago I would have written back with something like, “C’mon, can’t we push a little Melville and Swift instead?”

Not anymore. Books of any kind compete with so many digital diversions that just about any fiction that encourages long reading hours is worth a look — pulp or sports or Western or murder mystery or classic novel. Reading researchers believe that sheer volume of reading plays a large role in the acquisition of basic literacy skills and vocabulary, and that print matter of even child-oriented books can be more verbally challenging than some of the best television shows. (Read this entire article and note its far-reaching findings.)

Furthermore, I believe, the boy reading problem is reflected in the growing achievement gap between girls and boys. Admissions officers see this every year. At my old school, UCLA, the entering class last year was 59 percent female. Across town at Cal State-LA, the undergraduate population is 63 percent female. And officials expect the discrepancy to increase.

More leisure reading might help, and books like iPulp Fiction Library’s appeal to boys a lot more than the “problem stories” and identity narratives that fill Young Adult shelves in the libraries and bookstores. Back in high school, I remember boys passing around books as a kind of cool underground connection — including jocks and “stoners” (as they were called then). I was hit hard by The Brothers Karamazov and The Sound and the Fury when I was 18, but those didn’t catch on. What did was Ball Four, a knuckleballer’s diary of a season with the Seattle Pilots; North Dallas Forty, a novel about a receiver for an NFL team; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (yes, really); and someone snagged a copy of The Happy Hooker, too.

Do these kinds of secret reading networks still exist? We have Harry Potter, of course, but that’s a different thing, a juggernaut of popularity. Also, there is little evidence that Harry Potter has made many teenage boys read a lot of other books besides Rowling’s. We read the books above not because everybody else did, but because they met a curiosity, or a need, or insecurity, or humor, or heroism that we felt inside, or wanted to. Some of them had some good writing in them, too.

And so, when we spot one teenage boy reading a Conan book, or a Tarzan entry, or some pulp fiction on the train, we should nod and say, “Keep going. Read 50 more this year.”

Image from Photobucket.com

Posted at 06:33:23 PM on February 24, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. I teach Latin, history, and literature to homeschool students ranging in age from 12 to 18. The reading gap between boys and girls exists among homeschoolers as well. Mark Bauerlein’s conclusion that boys need to read an abundance of books is absolutely correct. Furthermore, until our schools begin to focus on making formal education more appealing to young men, the gender-based college gap will continue to increase.

    — Jeff Minick · Feb 25, 05:09 AM · #

  2. Sure, it’s great if kids read. But why is it better if they read, say, Tarzan instead of watching The Wire or Goddard films from Netflix? My brother is a great example. He would have told the NEA survey that he hasn’t read a book in years. But he’s seen nearly every important film of the past 50 years.

    MB does raise the important issue that any reading material pushes the student into new terrains of vocabulary and better comfort levels with certain genre conventions.

    Jeff’s comment raises an important issue as well, and he makes me think about complains that English curricula are increasingly girl-centered. But we need to be careful and examine what’s actually taught. In the four local districts I’ve worked with, high schoolers read much the same canon as I did 18 years ago: Oedipus, Antigone, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, MacBeth, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, 1984, The Great Gatsby, etc.

    Where’s Jane Eyre or Sense and Sensibility? And what poets do high schoolers read with the same degree of focus as William Golding, a literary nobody?

    So I wonder what pulp offers boys that these man-centered, violence-centered works don’t. And the answer is moral certainty and happy endings. I’ve always wondered why we teach Shakespearean and Greek tragedy and not comedy? Why Lord of the Flies and A Separate Peace and not Portnoy’s Complaint? Why 1984 and not Scoop?

    — Luther Blissett · Feb 25, 06:27 AM · #

  3. At the age of 6 I was whisked away from my native Germany to Belgium. My parents had left me behind shortly after my birth to the care of a chioldress aunt and uncle while they settled in belgium.Thus I learned my first foreign language French at age 6 . Actually i was the last of the class in the 1st grade and it is not until I and my family went in to hiding to escapedweortation and sure death like that of those who t reared me,i started reading books. So during the almost 3 years in hiding not going to school, I read non stop,during my waking hours, The principal of my elementary school , would come wherewe were hiding each week end and lend me books. Result , in the 6th grade city wide competition in verviers , Belgium , after the war, I finished first over all other fellow students, all non jews. I owe it to my non stop reading of books , somewere quite classical ones and many books about Jeus because if caught i would pretend I was Catholic. i read however also adventure stories like Jack London’s stories as well as those of Jules Verne. I thought you may want to know that. i am afree lancewriter in thre languages, French, German and English I am Woodrow Wilson national Fellow and for 6 months the Woodrow Wilson National fellowship had my story on its website. it was unfortunately removed when the new President, a Dr. levine, a Jew ironically, had it removed. I was very disappointed that he would do that.

    — Freddy · Feb 25, 11:02 AM · #

  4. If you read the article to which I posted, Luther, you’ll see why Tarzan books are better than The Wire for reasons of vocabulary development.

    — Mark · Feb 25, 11:04 AM · #

  5. I apologize for some of my typosin the previous comment. Please note that the Jules Verne sceince fiction books which I read between the age of 8 and 11 have had a great influence in my development of French . Of course English is my third language, whic h I started learning at age 13. I read then most of the classicals in English. However, I read the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in itss otiginal German, der Zauberberg. then in French, La Montagne Magique and finally the English translation. i enjoyed each differently but similar interest. Evenetially I was selected asa Woodrow Wilson national Fellow, ro go on to graduate schol. A I also taught histroy ata well known university, My story as I mentionned was on the website of the Woodrow Wilson National Felowship Foundation for 6 months, It was removed by Dr. Levine, the new President of the foundation upon him taking office. I naturally was quite disappointed especially since the man is a Jew and I survived the Holocaust because of my religion. So much about the often heardstory about Jews supporting other Jews, Not in this case anyhow!

    — Freddy · Feb 25, 11:14 AM · #

  6. I enjoyed reading your article about boy’s literacy. I’m the founder of a new, innovative program called Boys Read. Boys Read’s mission is to transform boys into lifelong readers. We’re an organization of parents, educators, librarians, mentors, authors, and booksellers. A core objective of Boys Read is to establish Reading Tribes. Tribes are informal reading circles for pleasure and non-deterministic learning. They’re very similar to book clubs. Tribes are a great opportunity to bond with boys. A Tribe Leader acts as a mentor and facilitator for the Tribe. Parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, coaches, and other community outreach programs and services organize Tribes. Our website features many extraordinary authors who have published numerous compelling and gripping novels that boys love. For more information about Boys Read, visit our website at boysread.org.

    — John Martin · Feb 25, 05:46 PM · #

  7. I am near death so I do not have a lot of time to namby pamby a bunch of illiterate video gaming dunderheads. The rewards of breaking through into highly abstract symbolic reasoning are so immense—that only complete fools and suicidal morons would do something easier and more “fun”. It is vastly more fun to make half a million dollars a year than to play games and make 60,000$ a year—I have tried it and the latter is a lot less fun. Everyone I know who has tried it strongly suggests that the latter is a lot less fun. It is NOT a matter of money (I use money because of the quantitative short cut impression making it enables) but the quality of mind one lunches with, the quality of joke one hears, the quality of sexual congress and supreme court that obtains when the gap between mind and genitals is immense.

    Finally, it is hard to conceive of any educated person being at all unable to easily sell dunderheads on the “reading door” to highly abstract symbolic thought and the “run of the world’s best everything” that comes from mastery of such thought.

    So, how do I teach? First, I tested my teaching approaches at the worst community college in Michigan (ballpark measure: bullet holes in arms or torsos of all students, blood stains on homework from some relative killing some other relative)—I taught a Lotus 1-2-3 class for them teaching calculation type A, macros for doing calculation type A, and artificial intelligence rule sets for generalizing and automating macros for calculation type A. I then tested them using grad AI course exams from nearby U of Michigan 1st year grad courses in computer science. My dunderheads averaged exactly what U of M elite students averaged. They were too ignorant to know that they were too “dumb” to do U of M artificial intelligence homework assignments!!

    Having demonstrated, to myself, that the worst college students I could find, were more than intelligent enough to do coursework at the best colleges I could find—that is, that the class system in this nation and the SAT system lie about human capabilities in their efforts to stratify people into social classes of superiority and inferiority to each other (male monkey culture some call it), I decided to get honest to my students, in all courses about THE READING DOORWAY.

    In my first classes, in every course I teach (to kids meeting me for the first time), I march down their attitudes, lifestyle, lousy parents, crummy civilization, stupid friendships like a T-34 WWII tank—ungently, unnicely, and rather rudely. I declare them illierates, and not worthy of me having lunches with them. I trott out video interviews of a few of my friends—some of whom read from childhood, many of whom started serious reading after encounter with one stubborn professor or an equally stubborn war. These people (asked by me) draw charts of their income and their books purchased per year, for their lives thus far. Wonderful correlations!!!—often with big discontinuities in them where they moved from illiterate jerks to hard working mind improvers of their own minds. To have these people—telling how they moved from 500,000$ a year to 1,500,000$ a year JUST WHEN they moved from 50 books a year to 300 books a year in reading, does for my students what namby pamby efforts to “include” “context” “induce” “invite” fail to do.

    As for reading IT MATTERS!!! It is not some sort of, maybe, partly, vague, unsure, small effect. It is a HUGE powerful immense change of life course. Get serious about the very most irritating abstract symbolic logics of the mind and you move from king of three drunk friends gaming to king of the twenty most beautiful women in Manhattan (or men), of the seven most beautiful vacation homes you could ever imagine. etc. READING MATTERS! Selling it is trivial. Not selling it is hard work.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Feb 26, 06:50 AM · #

  8. Thanks, Richard Tabor Greene, for the most interesting, even arresting, post I’ve read in quite a while.

    — Dan Kirklin · Feb 26, 07:28 AM · #

  9. Thank you Richard Tabor Greene for your comments – My most personally rewarding job was to substitute teach middle school in a low-income area with four so-called levels of students. Their names started with ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’ and the kids figured that out in about 3 seconds who was smart and who wasn’t. When I got a 3-day or more substitute teaching assignment, I would teach a 45 minute class in 15 minutes, then power through related work that was two grade levels above what the kids were doing and on an honors level. EVERY one of the classes responded enthusiastically and the ‘D’ students were only a few percentage points below the ‘A’ students. The kids did retain the advanced material based on drills and they also retained the assigned 15 minute lessons based on quizzes authored by the teacher. We need to raise the bar on expectations at all levels. High standards are the answer.

    — John · Feb 26, 08:08 AM · #

  10. Mark: Saying that reading helps vocabulary is a tautology: reading strengthens reading. No one disagrees with that. Belittled “progressive” educators have been saying for years that teachers must “scaffold” student reading by introducing them first to simpler and then to more complicated texts. If a kid can’t read Tarzan, she can’t read Shakespeare. So sure, better to get her reading Tarzan. Until she can read Tarzan easily, at which time she’ll cease to grow as a reader until challenged again. (This is all common sense to people who play sports. Or read Vygotsky. John’s high standards involve what V called moving a student through her zone of proximal development.)

    The question is, when does one type of reading stop generating great returns? When does the reader stop being challenged by the reading?

    The wealthy, beautiful people Richard describes are not wealthy and beautiful because they can read a lot of Clive Cussler.

    — Luther Blissett · Feb 26, 11:18 AM · #

  11. Thanks to mark for another important column. To the sources he cites, I would add Sandy Stotsky, who has done quite a bit of work on trends in reading for young boys, reaching similar conclusions.

    — David J. Rothman · Feb 26, 11:49 AM · #

  12. In response to Luther Blisset’s comment, I run a reading intervention program for delayed elementary school readers based on scaffolded free-choice reading (which, by the way, I am having trouble getting funding to study under the current zeitgeist, because it doesn’t teach phonics explicitly, since that is all these kids are getting in their regular classrooms!). In my experience with more than 200 struggling readers, kids will move happily on to more challenging reading as soon as they are ready for it, IF there is an adult or peer to “invite” them up to the next level, by suggesting and even starting books with them that are similar in theme or content to those they already enjoy.

    Most struggling readers, in my program at least, take a year or even two of this sort of reading support before they become library browsers and finders of books for themselves, a skill which the initially avid reader seems to develop almost immediately. Therefore, I think one of the most important skills a teacher or librarian or parent can have is a knowledge of “what’s out there” for kids to read AND an intimate knowledge of what is likely to appeal to each of the struggling readers they work with. Given this kind of support, I have so often seen the child (girl or boy) who started out reading only Clifford books move, within a year, to reading much more advanced humor like Howe’s Bunnnicula series or Coville’s Alien books. The same skill is invaluable to encourage reluctant or struggling readers at the middle or high school level, but again, it requires knowing the books AND knowing the kids, individually. Unfortunately, these are not the types of knowledge we emphasize in teacher preparation, especially at the secondary level. Until we do, and as long as teachers rely on pre-formed lists of “books for the seventh-grader” or whatever, I am afraid that the habit of leisure reading will continue to decline, with, as has been discussed, a concomitant decline in the ability of the general populace to read, write and reason.

    — Nancy Knapp · Feb 26, 01:26 PM · #

  13. And to the list of books for boys (though girls enjoy them as well), I would add Herge’s Adventures of Tintin.

    — becky · Feb 26, 03:16 PM · #

  14. I don’t think the problem is content. There’s lots of books out there to attract boys—Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and yes even Swift and Melville (was it Swift who wrote the essay that the rich should eat the poor? That should appeal to a teenage boy)—not to mention that many of the classics feature interesting, complex, well-fleshed-out male protagonists. I think the problem is that masculinity as defined by our society makes violence, sports and slacking off “cool” while intellectual pursuit is “nerdy.” For girls the message is different—a good girl studies hard and gets A’s. So boys do what they think they’re expected to do and girls do what they’re expected to do—and for boys, that’s got to change.

    — madame smartypants · Feb 27, 08:56 AM · #

  15. I just went back and read RTG’s posting. I am amazed— why exactly are people thanking him? This posting was crass, verbose, self-aggrandizing and self-pitying (I admit that it is quite a feat to accomplish both of the latter in the same posting—congrats on that one, RTG). Its message—that more reading leads to wealth and hence, a better life (because rich people are so happy?) doesn’t match reality. Skill at sports, acting, rich parents—these all seem to be much more sure-fire ways to become wealthy. So promising the kids better sex if they read more is at best stretching the truth a bit.
    What I do think you can get from reading is self-fulfillment. You also gain the verbal skills that will open doors for you later on—being able to read and write well communicates to others that you are an intelligent, well-rounded person worth respecting.

    — madame smartypants · Feb 28, 07:17 AM · #

  16. In my opinion, the most effective way of learning how to write well is through extensive reading. Monkey see, monkey do. It worked for this monkey, anyway.

    — Gustave · Feb 28, 09:54 AM · #

  17. THANK YOU, “madame smartypants.” I thought that I must be insane when I saw that people were thanking RTG for that drivel.

    If I had a professor whose first act before a room full of students was to “declare them illierates, and not worthy of me having lunches with them,” I would have walked out immediately. Until you have made some minimal effort to acquaint yourselves with your students, you cannot make assumptions about their literacy or how they live their lives. Perhaps some of those students are equally as intelligent and literary—I’d be willing to guess some of them were MORE so—than RTG himself.

    I had a teacher in high school who wasted the first two weeks of class telling us how stupid we were and writing the word “cat” on the chalkboard to see whether we could read it. As an avid reader (of works well beyond my grade level’s expectation) and a student of Latin, I was terribly offended. My complaints not only got me successfully transferred to a REAL teacher’s class, but they also resulted in that teacher receiving a stern warning from the principal. My written comments were even inserted into her personnel file with the school. Students of RTG, you CAN end the wildly disrespectful abuse!

    Expecting dumb, underachieving students is a sure way to breed them. A teacher can be a positive influence and encourage certain behaviors, like reading, without kicking people in the face.

    — Erin · Feb 28, 10:08 AM · #

  18. The gap between boys and girls is not a function of boys’ academic deceleration; rather, it is the function of a level playing field. Females have always been smarter than males but were impeded by a patriarchal system that placed social and logistical barriers to their ascendancy. As those barriers have been discovered and removed methodically over the last three decades, female superiority has been allowed, at last, to emerge. So let’s not maintain the patriarchal hubris by framing female ascendency as a function of a temporary male descendency. Get used to it: on a level playing field, females are the naturally better players.

    — marci · Feb 28, 11:06 AM · #

  19. When my two sons and daughter were tiny, my husband filled their world with books – books from yard sales, books from library sales, old books, new books, red books, blue books…you get the idea. What helped encourage them was seeing their parents take pleasure in reading and regularly spending time in a place where there were no electronic disctractions because their was no electricity – our summer cabin in Maine. Friends of ours were astonished when they visited us, around the time the kids were maybe 12, 10 and 7, to see them exhaust the possibilities of the outdoors and board games and voluntarily curl up with a good book. Today, my middle son spends more time plugged in than reading, but he too still asks for new titles by familiar authors ( he loved Brian Jacques followed by Terry Goodkind ). My daughter, the youngest, is now 14 and she astonished her guidance counselor recedntly by rattling off a half a dozen book titles when he asked her the last thing she’d read. Most students, he said, can’t come up with anything. So the formula for us was pretty straightforward: read to your kids, read with your kids, make lots of books available, talk about your reading and theirs. Our community has an “unplugged” day once a year. One day a year?! We can all do better than that.

    — Jane B. · Feb 28, 01:33 PM · #

  20. One additional tactic I forgot to mention: my husband would pay the kids a penny for every page they read. They would keep track and the money they “earned” went toward more books which they got to pick out.

    — Jane B. · Feb 28, 01:47 PM · #

  21. I know RTG is really Richard Tabor Greene, madame smartypants and erin who want to criticize anonymously. And reading more seems to be the common theme. I know my sons got very tired of my responding to their complaint of being bored with the statement that boredom is not room they walked into, but a relationship to their situation.They never are bored in their adulthood, because they carry a book with them, if they think things might go slowly. And it turns out the most important thing I did to encourage their reading was to tell them “I will be with you in thirty minutes — can’t you see I am reading?” My mother took my brother and me to the library weekly before we could read until we could get there on our own. Richard has done some extremely successful teaching and achieved very surprising results. The last time he moved his full household, I believe half of moving truck consisted of the books in his library. When President Bush told his interviewer that he didn’t read the newspapers but was briefed, (not to mention the photo of him in the preschool looking at the book upside down) the challenge of literacy in the richest nation in the world seems somehow serious.

    — Donald Bushman · Mar 1, 09:04 PM · #

  22. Further to the Boys Read project: children’s author Jon Scieszka started the Guys Read project some years ago. It seems to have a different focus from the Boys Read project, but they might do well to know of each other’s existence. (guysread.com)

    I’m pleased also that Luther has blown the myth of the feminisation of the English curricula. Here in Australia anecdotal evidence suggests that class texts are heavily weighed in favour of “boys’ books”, due to our anxiety about boys and reading and the largely unchallenged assumption that boys will not read books about female characters/“issues”, but compliant female students will read anything they’re required to. I’ve even heard that some schools will not employ female authors for author talks and workshops because they want male role models for their boys. Too bad for the girls who might like to see a female achieving in an area they aspire to.

    I would argue this is doing both boys and girls an enormous disservice, both in terms of their reading (and human) experience and maintaining entrenched gender roles. I would also argue that boys read a lot more than we give them credit for—we just don’t value what they choose to read (non-fiction, manuals, magazines etc) as highly as we value literary (and even non-literary) fiction.

    — Misrule · Mar 4, 12:43 AM · #

  23. 2 quick points to add:

    I’ve seen research to indicate that higher vocabulary correlates with career success, irrespective of education. Higher vocabulary might suggest advanced knowledge, or it may indicate better skills at communicating ideas to one’s peers.

    Second, see James Paul Gee’s groundbreaking books on video games and literacy. Gee is a reading professor who argues that reading occurs because the situation calls for it. Maybe boys don’t read novels per se, but they would read books about videogames and games in general. Any kind of game involving knowledge of lore (such as Yu-gi-oh cards) would cause boys to delve more into reading.

    — Robert Nagle · Mar 4, 02:48 PM · #

  24. To people who racistly appel themselves some sort of pants—Hannah Arendt said educating was a transfer of responsibility, learning was a transfer of information. We can pretend that students are so very very unique that we all must stand in awe of their awesome unique individuality even while we spend months searching for where and what it is—or—we can admit that waves of dummies come to us from high schools and bad parenting and personally take responsibility for going far beyond for what passes for learning and educating in modern American society and make our students flee us in cowardice or embrace our willful authoritative destruction of their self satisfaction with “normal” and “norms” of living they have imbibed from some of the worst parents in the history of the world in a nation now subject to one of the worst “failed cultures” in the history of the world. Or we can be nice to everyone all the time because life is so much easier when we all avoid responsbility.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 10, 12:10 PM · #

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