A Quote by Joanne Harris
I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.
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I wasn't seeing black girls in the books I was assigned to read at my school. I was tired of only reading about white boys and dogs and wanted to collect books featuring black girls.
I do feel that the boys are getting left out. Girls will read boys' books, but boys won't read girls' books. If you're writing for a girl, you've got most of the audience on your side anyway.
What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'
We've always read to the kids, every night both kids get books. That's really important, and they love books. Our daughter is obsessed with reading and books, so it's really sweet. She has her own little personal library.
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.
In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.
Lots of kids, including my son, have trouble making the leap from reading words or a few sentences in picture books to chapter books. Chapters are often long... 10 pages can seem like a lifetime to a young reader. Then reading becomes laborious and serious. That's why some of the chapters in my books are very short.
I don't think kids have a problem reading books meant for adults; the problem is on the other side of the fence, a misconception of what one kind of literature is 'supposed' to be, perceived to be, as opposed to another: if it's for kids, it can't be any good; it's got to have been dumbed down and/or sweetened up.
I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books.
So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
I have boys, and boys are particularly resistant to reading books. I had some success recently with Sherman Alexie's great young adult novel 'The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.' I told my son it was highly inappropriate for him and one of the most banned books in America. That got his attention, and he raced through it.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.
Boys forget what their country means by just reading "the land of the free" in history books. Then they get to be men, they forgeteven more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books.
The fact is that our kids aren't reading books - or frankly, much of anything lately. Schools are under funded, some schools even closing their libraries. Parents have to realize that it's their job, and not the school's job, to get kids into the habit of reading for fun.
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