Articles

Why Adults Can't Read Boy Readers

by Marc Aronson

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I was in Midway airport the other day, which gave me a good opportunity to spy on the reading habits of the American public. In our little bay, waiting for the plane, there were many adults immersed in magazines, a few with bestsellers cracked open, a teenage girl eagerly flipping through the pages of a color-splashed, ad-filled, celebrity-dominated magazine that was "just for her." The most avid reader of all, though, was tucked away in back, where he could concentrate. This was a boy who looked to be eleven or twelve, and he was studying his book with a concentration I saw nowhere else. His book was How to Catch Yellow-Fin Tuna. Ironically, from the point of view of the children's and young adult world, because of what he was reading, that boy passionately learning from those dense, printed pages, is a nonreader.

Boy readers, not boy-nonreaders, present a problem that is so fundamental to the industry that creates, publishes, and reviews books for younger readers that we hardly know it is there. The problem is not that boys do not wish to read, but that what they wish to read - what, in fact, they desperately yearn to read -- is not what we prefer to publish. I see this with my own son, Sasha, who is about to turn two. Like so many of his peers, he is passionate about cars. From the minute he wakes up and asks if we will use the car today to the second when he finally falls asleep as I read him My Car, or Trucks, or I Love Trucks, he thinks about cars.

There is a direct link between my son's unrequited lust for car books and that preteen boy poring over his adult fishing-instruction manual.

Notice the disjunction. He loves cars, and I placate him with trucks. We have discovered trucks in children's books - and videos. But for a boy like my son who would love to start with the diagram in My Car and move on to learning to identify the parts of a car, and to getting a sense of how a car works, there is almost nothing. While the percentage of Americans living on farms diminishes to zero, American children grow up with barnyards full of sheep, goats, cows, chickens, and rabbits all baaing, mooing, and clucking at them across endless numbers of illustrated pages. But they cannot find out how these amazingly cool machines that they see, ride in, and dream about every day actually work.

There is a direct link between my son's unrequited lust for car books and that preteen boy poring over his adult fishing-instruction manual. In between the two is something else I observed on the short vacation that preceded the plane flight home. We had just gone for a brief stay at Benton Harbor, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The water was icy, far too cold for even a dip, though Sasha minded much less than my wife or I did. But one day I saw a bronzed dad and two of his equally tanned sons run by, in and out of the water, throwing a stick ahead, and training their two dogs to fetch. It was great splashing fun, but also serious business as the father showed the sons how you instruct dogs.

The next day we saw the same family again, although this time they were moving up the beach in the opposite direction. One was in a kayak, the other hopped off a small sailboat and swam -- swam! -- to join his brother. Then, without a moment of discussion, they linked the boat to the kayak, and paddled ahead in perfect unison, dragging the boat with them.

Those two snapshots showed something of what growing up male is all about. It is developing physical mastery, first of yourself, and your own body, and second of the world around you through your body. This was much clearer when boys were being trained for physical jobs on those same farms immortalized now only in books for children, or in mines, or on assembly lines. Today physical mastery is most likely to take place through digital means - which is exactly what boys rehearse endlessly in video games.

The key point that the children's book world misses is that physical mastery requires concentration, intelligence, and the accumulation of knowledge. It also may involve bravery, humility, nobility, and certainly discipline and self-mastery. Of course it is this combination of sound mind, sound body that nineteenth century English boy books preached, based, I am sure on the values of the schoolmasters of Eton and Rugby and Harrow - as well as Groton, Exeter, and Andover. We have come to doubt that combination, seeing the sexual undertone in "self-mastery," the homoerotics of the schoolmasters, the cruelty of the schoolyard games. But in becoming wiser, or more cynical, we have lost sight a key to male growth. We have forgotten the intelligence needed to take control of your body, and, through it, to shape the world.

I do not question that this is important for girls, too. But note that so many of the stages of physical development in girls that were once off limits have become commonplace. In endless numbers of girl books, protagonists wonder about the appearance, size, and shape of their breasts; they fear, and then notice the appearance of their periods; they kiss, masturbate, have sex, and cope with the consequences. In turn there are boy books in which erections, nocturnal emissions, kissing, masturbation, sex, and consequences are central to the plot. But it is harder to find books in which physical maturation is not primarily about sexuality, but rather about the ability to influence and control the world. Certainly teenagers are very alert to how they can influence others through their sexuality, but that is really only one subset of their experience.

We tend to confine this other consideration of physical growth and the world to books about sports or survival - which is why the generic answer to any question about "what will my son like to read?" is Hatchet. We as an industry are not thinking like boys. We are not identifying with the curiosity of that sports-fishing boy I saw in the airport. We are not thinking, what would I need to know if I wanted to learn how to use my arms and legs and hands and brain to do X. Our books should be filling in that blank, between the boy's desire to engage in the world, his growing capacity to do so, and his lack of information about how he can. Our books should be the dad who once-upon-a-time lifted up the hood and explained how it all worked, and how he kept the jalopy on the road. Dads can no longer do that, with their leased cars that can only be repaired by mechanics with computers. But books can.

There is a great gap between boy, and even teenage, experience and the adult books those eager readers must turn to in order to answer their questions about the world. That gap will almost never be filled by fiction, or poetry, or folktales - although many folktales did serve that function in the communities that originally told them. They passed on wisdom. Boys hunger for wisdom, about themselves, about the world, about life. Our books prefer story and imagination, over wisdom and knowledge. Perhaps this is testimony to the fact that the women who have long been the guardians of children's literature were frustrated about their ability to act in the world. Imagination seemed so much more hopeful than fact. But today women run many of the publishing companies, library systems, and review journals; women make the book-buying decisions for chain bookstores. Surely we no longer need to turn away from grim fact to hopeful fantasy.

I think we need a literature that gets inside the excitement of taking hold of the world with your own hands and gaining control of it, through simple machines and complex ones; through physical (which we slander as "brute") strength, and through mental calculation and computation; we need books that understand the grace of kayaking in rhythm with your brother on a cold lake.

Until we as adults recognize this gap in the literature we create, we will not be able to respond to the aching needs of boy readers. And because we will not recognize that need, we will continue to call those boys nonreaders. Some will continue to make their way to adult books and magazines. Many will give up and when they put down the sports section, and turn off the complex instruction page they have just down-loaded, and stop picturing just how they would turn the boat slightly differently next time to catch the wind and not tip over, they will believe that they do not like reading and have no imagination. A very few will decide that they like reading so much, they might as well read what we give them until they are old enough to read what they choose. This is the landscape of boy reading we see today, and it is the creation of our own blindness.

Though I loved cars when I was a child, I took the third route, I read what was available and never learned how a car works. I hope that when Sasha is a teenager he can explain it all to me. It is my job to create the books that will make this possible.

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