At my house, we are voracious readers. At night, the last thing my kids and I do is pick out a book each can take to bed, where they are allowed to read for a little while before lights out. Somehow, the books multiply in the night, and in the morning I find each boy curled up in a nest of reading material.
Sometimes I look at the piles and wonder what an anthropologist would make of them. What kind of kid would they imagine reading himself to sleep with Smithsonian magazine, a years-old, dog-eared copy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes? (Among the elementary school set, Calvin and Hobbes is experiencing a bigger resurgence than Betty White.) Or my other son, who might drift off after leafing through seven or eight different cat-care manuals and a book on how cathedrals are built?
They’re quirky little people, and as astonishing as their curiosities make them, helping them find a steady supply of books that will hold their interest is a serious challenge. We make frequent trips to the library, but with varying degrees of success. We do best when we go armed with a particular need to find, say, biographies of a particular Revolutionary War hero or information about hermit crabs. Other times, when we’re just looking for good stuff to read, the stacks can seem overwhelming. Clearly there’s good stuff in there, but where to start?
For this month’s column I put this question to several librarians. Turns out, the place to start is… with the librarian. (An aside to anyone wondering whether to pursue a career as a journalist: Will spending your days calling experts, asking questions, and deducing from the replies that you have tumbled onto the painfully obvious make you feel like a) Woodward and Bernstein, or b) a chump?)
Lisa Pollard is youth services coordinator for the Scott County Library System and far, far too kind a person to laugh at me out loud. Confronted with a kid who has no idea what she might like, librarians have loads of tricks, she told me, starting with what they call a reference interview.
“What have you read that you liked?” they might ask, followed by, “What did you like about it?” No matter the answers, it’s important to hand the budding bibliophile lots of options. “I try to fill their arms with five or six similar books,” she says. Fewer and you risk losing kids, who are quick to assume there’s nothing interesting at hand.
What if your child isn’t much of a reader? Pollard will recommend a book based on a movie, or suggest the most popular books at the time, which maybe they’ve seen their friends reading.
Parents often make the mistake of trying to cajole reluctant readers into reading “real” books, as opposed to graphic novels or interactive books (think Dragonology or the Choose Your Own Adventure series).
Other suggestions from the Metropolitan Library Service Agency (MELSA), an alliance of metro-area libraries: Let reluctant readers know it’s okay not to finish a book that doesn’t interest them; websites count, as do joke books and trivia books; the familiarity of books in a series can make them less daunting.
Classics and adult nonfiction are often good choices for kids reading above grade level. Make sure to let these children know that they won’t be in trouble if it turns out they’ve picked up a book containing inappropriate material.
Also, those of us raised in the card-catalogue era might not think to look at the library’s website as an extension of the reference desk. But many maintain kids and teens sections that list URLs for an astonishing variety of booklists compiled by librarians and authors throughout the country. The St. Paul Public Library’s site, for instance, features a link that takes readers to the Skokie, Illinois, site, where there’s a list of banned books. Click on it and you get titles I’d be thrilled to bust my kids reading, such as Native Son, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, half the oeuvre of Judy Blume, and a much more recent book about body image entitled The Earth, My Butt and Other Big, Round Things.
St. Paul also refers online visitors to Seattle’s library site, which maintains lists of adult books that appeal to teens, books for teen readers of different races and ethnicities, as well as GLBT youth. Almost every site lists GuysRead.com, a truly irresistible site created and maintained by author Jon Scieszka, who is wise enough to suggest that Road and Track and Skateboarder magazines count.
The Hennepin County Library site boasts lists for kids whose parents are in the military, sites that can help kids find “readalikes” — as in, “If you loved The Lightning Thief you’ll enjoy…” (see our readalikes on page 14) — and dozens of lists created and uploaded by teens themselves.
I confess, a lot of the titles struck me as insipid. When did vampires become their own super-genre and why for girls? I was about to surf disdainfully away when I saw that the comment thread on a list generated by a fan of the Twilight series had 206 comments. I was astonished to find a lively debate about whether the author swiped her themes from classics such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Dracula. “Go read Wuthering Heights,” suggested “Scarbelline.” “Same basic (and I mean basic) ideas, but written with more complex characters, a stronger female protagonist, more passion, and beautiful language.”
Clearly, there are lots of ways to start a lifelong love affair with the written word, and if there’s one piece of advice Pollard would offer parents, it’s to check their preconceptions at the library’s front door. The most common parental mistake she sees: “Parents coming in and saying, ‘I loved this book when I was a kid, you’ll love it too.’ We all do it, we have this magical experience with a book and we think it will translate to our kid and it doesn’t.”
Particularly in the summer when they are supposed to be indulging themselves and not grownups who assign reading they may or may not care for, she says, “The point is to get them into the library and having fun.”
Your local librarian can help.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
