A friend sent me a text message earlier saying that he'd seen my recent post and had popped into the kids' section of the local library to see if they had any Fighting Fantasy books on offer. The answer was "no". A sign of the times; when I was a kid the library was my number one source of books in general and Fighting Fantasy ones in particular. I don't preach or predict doom for the publishing industry - there will always be books and people reading them. But it's a reminder how much the world has changed, and it makes me feel old and sad and nostalgic for a much simpler age. The texture of life was so different in those days, when a trip to the library on a Saturday morning was something I would look forward to all week; how quaint that concept seems nowadays when entertainment and information is all there at a few mouse clicks' distance.
By coincidence I was in a city centre bookshop yesterday. Waterstone's is booming. You can sense it just walking in the door of my local branch - it's always packed to the rafters. What isn't booming, though, is books for boys. Everywhere you look in the kids' section there are young adult books written by women, for girls. Further down the age scale there's a bit more variety, but not much. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that an alien could walk into the children's section of my local Waterstone's and think there was only one human sex.
It's not fashionable to worry about this - woke capitalism doesn't give a fuck about boys. I do, though. It's not that there shouldn't have been a rebalancing towards novels in which female characters get more of a chance to shine. Of course there should. It's rather that I wonder what I would do if I had a son and was thinking of how to get him interested in reading. There just isn't much available. It's not even as though I can dig out the books I used to read when I was a boy, because I haven't got them anymore, and were I to do so I'm not sure dusty old paperbacks from 30+ years ago would have a lot of appeal. There's only so long "Harry Potter" can remain a viable answer to this problem, if it ever even was one.
What happens when you get a generation of young men who have had such little encouragement to engage in reading and spend all their time looking at screens? We're about to find out, and I fear it's not going to be pretty.
One of the few male teachers I had growing up was in the fourth grade, and I think his reading of The Hobbit to the class is still the most memorable experience I have from all of elementary school. Those timeless classics (and thus always in print) should be the first place to point young readers but I am equally at a loss as to where they would go next.
ReplyDeleteThe year after I had the Hobbit read to me there was a series of youth fantasy books called Deltora Quest that I got into on my own, at least until my fifth grade teacher informed me that it "wasn't on her approved reading list" and forbade me from reading it during class time.
A lot of the fighting fantasy books also exist for android. Pretty well made.
ReplyDeleteStill prefer my books though. Surprising that the library does not have them. They are still in print, AFAIK
The various series by Rick Riordan seem aimed squarely at boys. My 11 year old is always reading one or another of them, anyway. When he's not reading Harry Potter. :-D
ReplyDeleteThat's what I thought of first as well. Artemis Fowl and Alex Rider books also seem to be popular.
DeleteI teach at the elementary level and review books on the side. My male students don't seem to have any problem finding books to read and quite a few of the books that cross my desk have male main characters.
While I'm definitely not in the anti-screen camp, I think that kids need face to face interaction and reading to help develop their communication skills and empathy. (And more outside play would certainly be welcome. I teach in an urban district and a depressingly large percentage of my students don't go outside to do anything unless they're going by car to a packaged fun center like Sky Zone.
Jonathan Haidt is really compelling on this. His basic argument is that the drive to keep kids safe actually stunts their growth and leads to anxiety and mental illness which actually ends up being more dangerous than just letting them play outside. I think it is less of an issue in the UK than it is in the US, from what I gather anyway, but still a serious one here; in the neighbourhood where I grew up ALL kids played outside ALL THE TIME but now you barely ever see kids out at all. On the other hand, in the neighbourhood where I live now it's not that unusual to still see kids playing outside - it is still part of the culture for whatever reason.
DeleteI remember moving Sheffield - Coventry - London. When I arrived in London I wondered "Where are all the children?!" - Turns out they did exist, they were just indoors.
DeleteNo outlet for physical exertion plus no interaction beyond the blue led display equals HDH disorder. Growth development math one-oh-one.
DeleteThose who haven't ever had to run away from dogs who definitely would bite if they caught you hasn't lived a full childhood.
I feel like this issue could be entirely avoided through a less gendered approach to child rearing, but also a less gendered approach to writing. Rather than breaking apart children's lit. into machismo or female empowerment, what if the stories had decent human characters in both genders? I don't think its true that the themes of types of stories are inherently gender exclusive. Harry Potter and the like is appealing to both boys and girls because the conflicts are interesting human conflicts and the characters are represented as interesting, bad-ass humans, regardless of gender
ReplyDeleteI agree with the conclusion - that decent human characters in both genders is a good thing - but don't agree with taking a less gendered approach to child rearing. I don't think the latter needs to go to the former and I think girls and boys tend to be "bad ass" in different ways that are biological at root.
DeleteAgree with noisms. "Boys will be boys" gets an awful rep nowadays but part of its empirical essence stands as desirable and entirely unavoidable for a healthy boyhood.
DeleteHmm ... I disagree somewhat. I certainly haven't noticed any shortfall in the amount of reading material that's perfectly suited for my son and his peers (most of whom seem to be pretty voracious readers). There's plenty for my daughter too, of course. And there's plenty that's great for both (Philip Pullman is perhaps the most obvious example; Patrick Ness is another).
ReplyDeleteOne point here is that the "young adult" section is, by and large, a means of selling fantasy and sf to teenage girls and *actual* adult women (young and otherwise). And every branch of Waterstones has a fairly hefty fantasy/sf section, which, I'd argue, provides much the same to teenage boys and men (that, not the young-adult or children's section, is where you find the Warhammer novels, for example, which I imagine are mainly read by teenage boys; there seems to be a whole shelf devoted to those in many Waterstones branches).
It's not strictly divided by sex, of course: my 10-year-old son is reading Mortal Engines, which is in 'young adult' in Waterstones; and I'm sure my daughter will find stuff that she'd enjoy in the fantasy/sf section in a couple of years. And of course, lots of the 'young adult' demographic find stuff that they enjoy in mainstream fiction or in other genres (e.g. crime). But there is a parallel structure there.
Another point is that just about everything that was around when we were kids is still there; I saw Fighting Fantasy books in Waterstones not long ago (albeit with unfortunate 'modern' illustrations in place of the Russ Nicholson classics). Sure, it might be harder to find Lone Wolf (in print, at least) or Grailquest or whatever, but there's enough to fill a childhood still. Moorcock is usually to be found in Waterstones, and I'm fairly sure George RR Martin goes down well with teenage boys. And staples of my childhood library borrowing like The Stainless Steel Rat can be had on the high street as well as from Amazon. Of course, kids very quickly catch on that just about anything's available through the 'long tail' Amazon effect. And they're more exposed to "If you like that, you'll love this" recommendations than ever before.
And, for boys especially, there's plenty of 'red-blooded' fiction in the classics that Waterstones (and schools and libraries) aim at kids. Stevenson, for example: my son loved Treasure Island a couple of years back. Or Kipling: the Jungle Book's a gateway drug to an absolutely huge body of work containing spanning war stories, adventures, out-and-out sf and full-blown horror (and much else besides).
So I don't think things are as bleak as you make out - at least from the supply side. The real problem, I think, lies with demand - which is why the rationing of electronics and the promotion of the outdoors and reading become so essential. But if you can get boys reading, they won't have a problem filling their childhoods with gripping books.
Yeah, Warhammer is a good point actually. I suppose I'm wondering what fills the void between Treasure Island and Moorcock or whatever. For me it was Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, and I suppose the Lord of the Rings. I'm wondering if there is anything forming the same bridging function into fantasy/SF particularly (other than, well, LOTR).
DeleteMy gateway drug was probably the TSR novel. Dragonlance novels first and then Drizzt. Before that youth-oriented weird fiction—Phantom Tollbooth, Indian in the Cupboard, Wrinkle in Time—and "kids having adventures, possibly stranded in the wilderness"—boxcar children and three investigators are two series I recall being into that are examples of the second. Now that I think of it, "kids stranded in the wilderness and having adventures" is, genre-wise, reasonably close to the open world survival fantasy I like in games.
DeleteThat's interesting food for thought for future blog posts: is the type of D&D you like rooted in early experiences of fantasy fiction? One book that was very influential on me as a youngster was a Fighting Fantasy novel called I think the Trollgate Wars. It was about a struggle between two evil archmages and their minions. To this day I've always loved the motif of competing bad guys.
DeleteA lot of those books aren't really age-dependent (Treasure Island's thrilling at whatever age you read it). So I reckon the bridging can be performed by almost any one of them. I'd read (or initially had read to me) Lord of the Rings before I came to Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Stormbringer is in many (most?) ways a less challenging read than The Dark is Rising.
DeleteActually, Susan Cooper's works are a great example of what children's literature could do with more of: really challenging, powerfurl stories that aren't 'comfort reading' in any way (although there's a place for that too, of course).
One general point in favour of fantasy literature for kids is that it leads you to ancient and medieval literature. Read The Hobbit and LotR, and you're nicely set up to enjoy a translation of Beowulf. Like Stormbringer? Then you'll love the Iliad and the Odyssey. Slaine takes you to the Tain (and Njal's Saga, in one instance).
As a side-note, on booming prestige bookstores: my UK experience may be limited (and it is: I spent all of three days in Central London, of which I spent one day walking around mostly at random, and the rest at a dull workshop - that's me and the UK), but I was struck by how few bookstores there were outside a few large and fancy ones, and two or three academic specialists all located in the same general area. I eventually got myself a beautifully made edition of Dashiel Hammett's novels at the one place that had a generous selection, but the impression stayed with me. Very odd feeling; not an encouraging one. Hopefully not representative either.
ReplyDeleteWaterstone's is more or less the only bookstore chain left. The UK's retail climate is very homogenized - it's all chains and all the same chains everywhere you go. Very bland.
DeleteIf I may, here's a list of bestsellers for kids, where males are the main characters. I´ve seen plenty of kids reading them: the Percy Jackson series, "How to Train your Dragon", "Tom Gates: Zombie Dogs Rule" and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid".
ReplyDeleteI imagine demand plays some role here. I only have myself to go off of, but as a kid, I mostly read random stuff from the school library, with only a few series standing out; in both cases, a lot of stuff was older, like Jack London books on a single-case basis, or Narnia as a series. By 5th Grade I'd mostly "graduated" to reading the "adult" books my mom and dad had sitting around (which eventually spiraled into Appendix N), which, again, were generally older (leading to my present as an adult, reading mostly things in the public domain).
ReplyDeleteI imagine a lot of boys growing up now, with technology being so ever-present, will be in a similar boat: Either they pick up reading from their parents, and start to read what their parents read; Or they just don't read, because now is the era of YouTube videos. Naturally there will be exceptions. As for girls, I knew and still know relatively few who are as inclined towards older books, which leads me to suspect they're simply a better audience in that regard; however, that might just be anecdotal.
I think the "just don't read" demographic is much bigger than it was. Obviously that's partly because technology is better but I also wonder if it's just that there's less stuff that boys would be into.
DeleteI read bedtime stories to my son for many years. He always enjoyed it but never showed much interest in reading for pleasure himself. I think the most recent thing he enjoyed was The Hunger Games trilogy. He took against CS Lewis when The Last Battle was insufficiently epic for his Hollywood-influenced tastes. Attempt at Harry Potter was a total flop, I probably hated it more than he did.
DeleteThese days we tend to watch Youtube together - he likes stuff like Sargon of Akkad and Tim Pool; I'm more a Shadiversity & Lindybeige kinda guy. But he really likes Tim Pool.
I have a lot of time for Tim Pool. I am not a big Youtube watcher (just some whisky reviews and old comedy show clips) but Tim Pool came into my awareness via Joe Rogan and I think he's a very interesting figure.
DeleteTalking of whisky, my Sainsburys local was out of Balvenie so I picked up some Jura yesterday, just cracked it open today. Very nice - recommended!
DeleteAn old friend of mine always has a Jura as the last drink of a night-out so I can only associate it with it being about 1am and him going to the bar and coming back with two doubles of it... Not that that's a bad thing necessarily. I you like Balvenie I recommend Edradour - not available in your local supermarket but the 10 year old is relatively cheaply available online.
DeleteCheers! :) (Or Slainte)
DeleteSo far it hasn’t been a problem for my boy...but I’ve exerted a lot of influence over his habits. The problem for me is more of getting him to read something OTHER than the crap that passes for “boy’s fiction” these days (like Potter or that damn Diary of a Wimpy Kid stuff).
ReplyDeleteChildren of parents who don’t parent? Tough to say what will happen.
My son doesn’t really care who the main protagonist is in a book or show. So long as it has magic, monsters, curses, and moves at a good clip. We have been reading the Theodosia books of late and he really enjoyed them. The only older books he has liked so far has been the Bellairs supernatural mysteries which feature a wide cast of characters now that I think about it. Though for a 8 year old he sometimes has interesting observations. He once asked me about cartoons I watched as a child. And we found some YouTube video of 80’s cartoons intros. He watched several intros and asked plot questions about them. And when we were done asked me why there was only 1 or 2 girl characters in every show. He thought that dynamic was odd. So I don’t think there is any lack of literature or entertainment for boys. The kids may not being see the same drought that you do when they browse the bookshelves. Just looking at his bookshelf now ... there is a wide range of stories of adventure.
ReplyDeleteThat's true, but then there's nothing for them to compare their own experience to. I don't doubt bookish boys will find books they want to read. It's the non-bookish ones who are the issue.
DeleteI have two young boys. They're not quite up to YA yet, but they sure do read a bunch. I haven't noticed any lack of fun "boyish" adventure stories for them to read. I also live in an area that should be ground zero for "woke anti-boy bias."
ReplyDeleteAre you sure you're not projecting your desired grievance onto a situation where it may not exist?
Pretty sure.
DeleteI imagine so.
DeleteThis, for instance, is an interesting article: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/boys-and-books
DeleteWhether you like it or not, serious people understand that there is an issue to address, whether your own sons, who I assume *are* encouraged to read and have inherited bookish genes anyway, are not part of it. There are a multitude of reasons why there is a problem, I am sure, but I am also sure - as somebody who was a 10-year-old boy once - that when I walk into the older kids' section of my local bookshop I see almost nothing that leaps out at me as being very appealing, but lots of stuff that the girls in school would have liked.
" I see almost nothing that leaps out at me as being very appealing, but lots of stuff that the girls in school would have liked."
DeleteI definitely think the feminisation of children's adventure/fantasy fiction is a real thing. I noticed it years ago - I have a friend who's a Young Adult author - female & mixed race, which seems pretty much necessary to be a YA author these days - so I started looking at the genre. Some stuff like Hunger Games is readable by all despite the focus on female issues like "Which of these cute boys will I choose?" - but it's definitely a change. I don't think it's just that boys& men have been actively pushed out of fiction. Computer games & now Youtube provide different and often more attractive avenues of interest. Currently RPGs have gone from male-dominated to socially mixed. If they go female-dominated I worry boys will lose interest there too, but no sign of that yet I think. I know a 12 year old new GM, last night he was telling me his school campaign is up to 19 players and he's had to get a co-GM. :)
I don't disagree that there is a gap between boys and girls in reading interest -- and perhaps it may be widening?
DeleteBut it has not been my experience that (as you suggest in the post) this has resulted in some huge dearth of materials such that there aren't even sufficient "boy books" out there to get a boy interested in reading.
I know there's also a whole phenomenon--which is odd to me--where adult women read tons of YA books. Maybe that's what's driving the content of that section in your bookstore more than actual kids?
"some huge dearth of materials such that there aren't even sufficient "boy books" out there to get a boy interested in reading."
DeleteI think there's a feedback loop - fewer boys buying fiction = less boy oriented fiction = fewer boys buying fiction.
Comics are a bit different. By son was a keen reader of Marvel Superhero comics until the Black Veil of Wokeness descended upon them. I felt terrible when he eagerly spent £12 of his own money on a fat paperback anthology at Forbidden Planet and it turned out to be unreadable SJW garbage - Civil War 2. He was so sad. After that he lost interest in the comics and just watches the films.
I dunno man, seems like a lot out there to me.
ReplyDeleteOf course Harry Potter as you mentioned, but lots of those young adult adventure novels, such as Hunger Games and Maze Runner. (Yeah Hunger Games has a female lead but I'm just gesturing to the genre.) Plus, once you get to the Harry Potter level, it's only a hop and skip to 90% of genre books. For bookish young guys it seems like a non-issue. Also check out the listings on Amazon (Teen & Young Adult / Boys & Men Fiction, for a start).
That said, if you want to get evidence based, there's a useful intro article on Psychology Today ("What Is It with Boys and Reading?") which lays out some facts worth considering, which are mixed. Male protagonists outnumber female 1.6:1 but boys report it being hard to find books they want to read. Seems like an open question whether the issue is differing motivation or differing availability.
Just get Patrick to start writing Warhammer novels and that will fix like four problems at once.
Haha. I have nagged him about it many times.
DeleteI suppose what I'm thinking about is the non-bookish boys. Bookish boys will always find books to read. Those who aren't bookish would I think back in the day have been attracted by "choose your own adventure" gamebooks or "boys' own" things and moved from there, possibly, into real fiction. That avenue now seems to have been cut off.
At my cram school in Korea I assign the kids a lot of novels and the ones the kids like the best are Franny K. Stein Mad Scientist, Captain Underpants and Wimpy kid and all three are written by men and two of the three have male main characters. Don't really keep up with the higher level stuff though, which does seem to be more female-oriented.
ReplyDeleteDavid - old books before nee ones, as per Lewis. That dusty paperback really may be the best bet. There's a whole world inside.
ReplyDelete(Or to put it differently - I see no merit inherent in anything new over Grahame, Lewis, etc.)
((A decent modern writer, who much like Lewis writes well for both genders, is N.D. Wilson - though he's very much YA rather than for 6 year olds, say.)
I have a son (11 going on 12) and yeah, this is a big issue. The one thing he'll read voraciously (and memorise) are my D&D Monster Manuals - they help his PCs stay alive. Fiction, well, he's been reading Ready Player One at school for a good while now, and likes to boast about - when I was his age I could read a couple books a day.
ReplyDeleteOn the bright side he does seem to learn a lot more from Youtube than from school. His knowledge of geopolitics on the Korean Peninsula is encyclopedic.
I would still to this day gladly read fictional bestiaries if written by decent authors (see e.g. Fire on the Velvet Horizon). It's strange that, apart from that one by Borges, there are so few "mainstream" fantasy books that are bestiaries. There would surely be an adult market for them.
DeleteThere's a series of "Dragonology" books that, at least from their placement in Barnes & Noble, appear to have enjoyed some popularity, although I was never interested enough in the design to check it out.
Delete"Monster Blood Tattoo" by D. M. Cornish has a good bestiary section in the appendix, and "Thisby Thestoop and the Black Mountain" by Zac Gorman is a bestiary-esque chapter book (both YA). And of course there's the "Spiderwick Field Guide" by Holly Black with illustrations by Tony DiTerlizzi, based on a series of YA books by the same duo. I don't know if Spiderwick has adult appeal, but there are a ton of chapter books in the series so it must have sold to somebody. The art book was extremely popular with my college's illustration department (I have a copy myself). Wayne Barlowe's "Expedition" and "Inferno" are great too (his "Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials" I like less, but it's still pretty cool). Barlowe's a workmanlike writer at best, but he provides fictional context and thoughts about his design process, which is good enough with books that nice.
I remember my son was into 'Beast Quest' books. I thought they were terrible.
DeleteCan't speak to the writing, but from the covers and concept they look fun as hell. I probably would've been into those as a young kid.
DeleteBruce Coville's Magic Shop series is very good and features a different monster or magic object in each, if your son is still reading middle grade books.
Beast Quest are like the Pot Noodle of children's fantasy. Boys love them but they're definitely junk food.
DeleteRight-wing US author Brittany 'banned from UK' Pettibone just did a video on "Why Are BOOKS Becoming So TERRIBLE?" focused on Young Adult fiction:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQKHRJe6qU - watching it now.
I have been thinking about something sort of in this line since Harlan Ellison died, and we heard a round of complaining about him. Now with Wolfe passing as well, and seeing this post again I must wonder out loud how so many cultural vectors appear to be hitting in the same direction. The writers old enough to get drafted are dying off. What will the literary landscape look like when not one author has even thrown a punch in anger, to say nothing of experiencing warfare?
ReplyDelete