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Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

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Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#151

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Izkata wrote: post #50

> Yet I can’t help but be worried that the kinds of books that changed my life between ages 8 and 12 are falling by the wayside. Is there room for the thoughtful, serious, beautiful young-person’s novel in 2024? Can you publish Bridge to Terabithia in the age of Captain Underpants? ...Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about. The popular series I…

> Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about.

Exactly. It's a book adults think kids should read (because literature or whatever), not a book that kids actually care a rip about reading.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#152

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

petercooper wrote: post #94

I read a lot when I was young and a big motivating factor for me was the natural progression to reading grown up books and works of literature with more interesting plots and subject matter. Nowadays, there seems to be more commercially-driven infantilization of entertainment where comics and books for kids are no longer a stepping stone but an end destination. My teenager only reads manga and comics which can be ver…

I agree. Looking back at my own reading as a kid, I worked my way through the "age appropriate" material really quickly, in part, because those books simply weren't that interesting. They were more about learning to read. Once I got through those kids books (and I saw them as kids books even when I was a kid), I moved to "adult" books as soon as I could because they are better novels, and I could tell that right away, with more complex stories, better characterization, better prose, different settings, and a real sense of scale and ambition.

A lot of it comes down to context: my parents were and remain voracious readers. They read all the time and have strong opinions about books, and I wanted to read what they did and have strong opinions about books in the way that they do. That sensibility was something they taught and which I grew up in. I could just as well see the absence of that having an effect.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#153

Post by zdragnar »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have. I went to a private "college prep" high school, and the amount of assigned, mandatory reading was insane. I spent so much time reading assigned novels that I just didn't have time to read for pleasure. (And why read for pleasure if I already spent 30+ minutes reading a boring / awful novel as part of my home…

I had plenty of assigned reading and half-assed it because high school classwork was not hard l remotely hard. Writing an acceptable book report was trivial with only some brief scanning.

I still read for fun, but stuck to fiction.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#154

Post by thefaux »

INTPenis wrote: post #133

I'm 40 but I think I know, from personal experience, why kids stop reading. A video game in the 90s was 10x more exciting and immersive than most books, to me. Today it's at insane levels of over-stimulation. A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead. Not only life-lessons or hacks either, teenagers are producing entir…

> A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead.

Perhaps, but if that is true I highly doubt that you can actually absorb the information in 30 seconds. Doubly so if you quickly move on to the next thing, as tiktok pushes you to do (I guess? haven't used myself).

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#155

Post by MisterTea »

akira2501 wrote: post #114
janalsncm wrote: post #56

> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back th…

> Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.

In the NYC public libraries there are kids sections where you just walk around and look at books. If something seems interesting then pick it up and read it. I preferred things with technical pictures so the kids section was quite boring.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#156

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #42
voidpointercast wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the same for me, down to reading silly non-fiction books just to read something as a child. This has become nearly vestigial as I've gotten older. I'm curious what books you felt were 'for' you?

Books like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, 1984, Animal House, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. made much more sense to me than any of the Judy Bloom style books that are so prevalent. The last of those books I enjoyed was "How to Eat Fried Worms," and then, that only resonated with me because we were forced to participate in a school book dressup day and I realized…

> I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.

You might like Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" [0]. The prose style is idiosyncratic, but also arguably his most accessible. It's about a 16 year old crossing over into Mexico and with little else but the clothes on his back and love for horses, but not "juvenile" --- if anything the author elevates the teen's stumbles into love, adventure, and heartbreak, into a grand vision of the American frontier.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Pretty_Horses_(novel)

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#157

Post by triceratops »

akira2501 wrote: post #114
janalsncm wrote: post #56

> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back th…

> Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy. At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.

Weird. At 9 I randomly picked whatever looked interesting. If I liked it, I proceeded to read every single other thing by that author.

There was no "word of mouth" because I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#158

Post by araes »

The situation with kids is an issue. However, about the mean attacks online mentioned in the article, the American Library Association president, unfortunately made a rather poorly chosen quote at almost the inflection point they're describing, in April 2022. Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Wyoming pushed to withdraw from the ALA after the quote. Per [1], on being elected, Drabinski wrote:

> “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary”

Sure, it's a single tweet. It mentions a better world. However, I also suspect most normal Americans with slight sense of political winds right now (Ukraine, Feb, 2024?? 2 months?) might comprehend why labeling yourself as a "Marxist lesbian" who "wields collective power" might be taken wrong by some of America on being elected to lead all American libraries.

I used to work for/with the Feds, and I think they would have been justifiably mad if I had very publicly announced I was a Marxist who wields power in the Feds on election.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/american-library-associ...

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#159

Post by IncreasePosts »

INTPenis wrote: post #133

I'm 40 but I think I know, from personal experience, why kids stop reading. A video game in the 90s was 10x more exciting and immersive than most books, to me. Today it's at insane levels of over-stimulation. A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead. Not only life-lessons or hacks either, teenagers are producing entir…

No, a 30 second tiktok clip cannot give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can. That is such a silly thing to say, that I can only imagine you heard it on tiktok.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#160

Post by somenameforme »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88

Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have. I went to a private "college prep" high school, and the amount of assigned, mandatory reading was insane. I spent so much time reading assigned novels that I just didn't have time to read for pleasure. (And why read for pleasure if I already spent 30+ minutes reading a boring / awful novel as part of my home…

I had a similar, but different, experience. My issue is that in school I approached reading as a task to be completed in the most efficient manner possible - consuming as much as I could, as rapidly as I could, while ensuring an ability to regurgitate on demand. So I never really got to experience the joy of actually reading; in many cases I never even actually thought about what I was reading. So many books have amazing moral tales, metaphors of major events, and so on - yet one can completely consume books and remain absolutely clueless to what you're really reading.

Then as I aged, at some point I ended up getting into classical literature somehow, and now that I actually "got it" and could see and understand what it was saying - beyond the words themselves, it became a complete joy to read. For instance reading "The Republic" in modern times can make one think Plato was a prophet more than a philosopher. Or reading Aristotle's "Politics" can give one such an incredible amount of insight into thinking in the past, society, and even into your own thoughts. Or reading Aurelius' "Meditations" while bearing in mind these were the inner thoughts, never meant to be published, of not only one of the greatest leaders in history, but also arguably the single most powerful man alive at the time. It makes reading feel amazing. Another less well known example would be The King's Mirror [1]. A Norwegian text from 1250 that was a training/philosophy manual, in the form of a Q&A, intended for King Magnus VI. Highly recommended.

Now I see things like middle schoolers being assigned Animal Farm and I just kind of sigh, though it's not like I can think of a better solution!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1

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