Why Teenagers Read Better Than You
Renée Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996/97 (via Artdaily)
Asked to picture a reader — a passionate reader — many of us will think of ourselves when we were young. Tucked under covers with a flashlight, staying up until the morning, so desperate to see the story play out. Maybe you didn’t have friends to sit with during lunch period, so you hid in the library. Maybe your parents didn’t let you keep a TV in your bedroom — or maybe they did but you thought sitcoms were stupid. You needed solitude — to shut the door behind you and escape from the daily trials of childhood. Homework, hormones, teasing, rules, chores, boredom.
China Mieville, at his talk at the Harvard Bookstore a few weeks ago, said he wrote his YA book “Un Lun Dun” because he’s “jealous of the way [young people] read.” No matter how much he loves a book now, it’s never quite as intense an experience. Cynics might say his publishers encouraged him as young adult books are so profitable, but, “if it were a mercinary decision,” Mieville explained, he’d just write ten more Bas Lag sequels.
For all the alarmism in our dwindling newspaper book sections on how our collective declining attention spans make novel reading more and more impossible, one point is completely lost: who reads more than teenagers?
As I explained in my talk at the Media in Transition conference at MIT a few months back, YA book sales are rocketing. Young people, who learned T9 before long division, have no problem curling up with a good book. Sales of young adult lit remain high even in this economy. Why is it other than teenagers are the most passionate readers?
There are several reasons why so many teenagers are passionate readers. A book is a pathway inside another person’s head. When you are young, you have few deep relationships, maybe no real emotional connections with others at all. You connect in the text. At that age, it is a revelation to see an author has the same dreams and insecurities as you do. Plus, there is a confidence and conviction to a fiction narrative’s voice. You are eager for someone to look up to, but certainly not your parents, not your teachers. A novel is an opportunity to really listen to another human being.
The solitude, the sense of emotional connection, and the guidance of a novel are all appealing to teenagers who might otherwise busy themselves exclusively with videogames and the Internet. And it shows. For the most part, young adult sales continue to rise even while book publishing is experiencing a significant decline.
Industry experts will say sales reflect the new diversity in the young adult market. There is a Harry Potter gold rush of writers who might never otherwise consider the genre. These writers are pushing the boundries, introducing ideas and themes darker and wilder than ever before.
Certainly, the increasing quality of young adult books is a draw. But there are exceptional videogames, there are exceptional websites and exceptional television programs to fight for a teenager’s attention. So why are they still reading?
I think there is another reason why young adult novels are doing well, and it is less easy gauge. As of yet, there are no real studies determining this, but anecdotally, we all relate to it. A book is an opportunity to get “off the grid.” We read to break free of their digital tether. To experience what life was like before the net. To disconnect. To finally feel alone.
A book holds your hand in solitude and says, here you are alone in your room and everything is alright. You don’t need to call a friend or Twitter something. The world is still turning. If you go for a forty minute walk without your mobile, don’t worry, you’re not going to miss anything.
Previously: New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?
Update 6/23/09: Paul Raven has a smart response “are we confusing marketing with markets” on Futurismic: “This is a mantra we heard over and over again during the massive YA genre fiction circle-jerk last year, and it’s always backed with the unvoiced assumption that only Young Adults read YA. I’ve worked in a library, and I can assure you that’s an observable falsehood; most genuinely popular YA is successful precisely because so many adult readers with an expendable income enjoy the same titles… I have no beef with YA fiction, or with those who choose to write it, or those who choose to read it. What I do have an issue with is the assumption that by marketing certain books as being for young adults we can treat their success as indicators of health in young adult reading specifically. The pedestal-mounting of YA as the saviour of modern fiction is dangerously misguided.”
“hello, my name is Ben. I’m a 29-year-old quadriplegic … Without the use of my fingers you can imagine how difficult reading books could be, but I loved reading and I found ways. I had a surgery about two years ago on my midsection which made it impossible to tolerate the weight of heavy books, and without the use of my fingers paperbacks were not an option (they would simply fall off the book holder when I tried to turn a page.) Into my life comes the Kindle… I literally shed tears as I realized Amazon had given me back the passion that had been stripped away from me after my surgery just as my mobility had been taken away 14 years earlier.” – from an Amazon review.
“In Western culture we read from left to right. The ‘good guy’ in most movies enters screen left moving across screen left to right. Our eyes follow comfortably, we subconsciously make positive inferences. Conversely, the antagonist usually enters from the right.” – ‘Cinematic Storytelling’ by Jennifer Van Sijll, found on Mrs. Tulip.
“I have an idea that simple black marks on white paper penetrate the mind deeply & quickly. If this is correct, a humble paperback book has great power, beyond its traditional use as a container for words.” – Tim Gaze, author of Noology, on asemic writing. (via.)
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Jeremy Dickinson, “Football League Wall Map of England and Wales” NYT recently did a story about people addicted to keeping up with the news. One of the interviewees reported bringing her Kindle to bed with her to keep up with blogs — and many of us can relate. So often I have fallen asleep with my iPhone in my hands, catching up on RSS feeds. This probably sounds unhealthy but I really have gone though Instapaper while fixing dinner — skillet in one hand, iPhone in the other.
I could wait to fire up my laptop, but even in opportunities when it seems more appropriate, I sometimes favor my iPhone. The tactile experience of scrolling through text makes me focus on the article I’m reading at the moment, curbing the urge to open multiple tabs (mostly because I can’t do so inside a significant time delay.) Plus, I don’t think of my iPhone as the key piece of my “workstation.” What this means is I’m emailing less and commenting less, but reading much more.
Yehudit Sasportas, “Black Circle I” Every writer should aim to read at least as much as he writes — to feel, at the very least, you are in someway advancing the pursuit of ideas rather than offering something redundant to the hundreds of thousands of books published every year. And that’s true for anyone on the Internet.
But discussion on blog posts usually disintegrates into repetitive or inflammatory remarks when a thread gets lengthy. Arguably no one, at comment 1,000, read everything before he pressed submit. Marginal Revolution once posed the question, “Does the quality of blog comments deteriorate?”
1. The truly smart people only like to make smart points on “fresh” posts. For instance more people read the comments on fresh posts (but why?), so the benefit of a quality comment is lower as the post becomes older.
2. As time passes, the chance that a warring twosome find each other, and take over the thread, increases.
3. There is a tendency to attack or respond to the stupidest or most controversial thing said, and the longer the comments thread runs for, the stupider this will get.
4. As the number of comments multiplies, so does the number of independent discussion threads and the optimal number of threads is exceeded.
5. (Addended) As one (early) commentator notes below, the simple fact of diminishing marginal utility.
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
Olaf Breuning, “Smoke Bombs”
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading. Jerry Brito got AlphaSmart Neo last winter explaining, “If I go to a coffee shop to get some work done, the only thing I can do with my Neo is write. There are no distractions. There isn’t even bold or italics (something I get around with Markdown). When writing is the only thing you can do, you get it done, and it remains an enjoyable activity because it’s not the thing that’s keeping you from Twitter.”
A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
Images from ArtInfo’s Frieze preview
Previously:
Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital
New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?
Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
Why Are Literary Readings So Bad? (via.) Readers and writers, are, almost by definition, introverts. Less charitably: extremely shy. I’ve never meet anyone at readings and I probably never will, but it’s always an odd experience gawking at the people who may have loved a book as much as I did. It surprises me authors so infrequently play with the format. Elements of theater could be implemented on a budget. Play some music as they talk…nothing too much, Stars of the Lid or something.
Why Read at All?
Recently, I toured a building full of studios awarded rent-free to artists. It was four floors and three blocks long, maybe 300 studios total, but I didn’t see more than several artists I felt contributed anything memorable, let alone worthy of state-assisted housing. I suspect these residents are excellent essayists and know how to sell themselves in grant applications, because never in history have we had a shortage of starving artists.
Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art explains why it is some artists succeed, even if their actual visual work is underwhelming. “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks,” she tells the Boston Phoenix.
Brottman’s new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, sounds much more antagonizing than it actually is. She is arguing against literacy as the only way to measure true intelligence, and that novels are a less relevant way to communicate language now that we deal with words all day online and in text messages.
When I first read about this book, I thought it was an actual treatise against reading and was reminded of the character in Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” who never reads novels only literary criticisms, “You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion.”. But, Brottman isn’t validating the blowhard bluffers who have opinions on titles they’ve only encountered, she’s investigating the striving desire to board the frigate at the expense of other things.
“I read all the time, [but] there were some things that reading did for me that were not positive … It alienated me from my family, and my country. It gave me an idealized picture of romance and what the world was like. And it made me socially dysfunctional…I would be a better, more well-rounded individual if I had not spent so much time locked in my room reading when I was a child,” she explains in another interview.
Why do I read anyway? Books that are “impossible to put down” are very hard to come by, especially when there is so much more in life to get done –or enjoy. It’s a holiday and lovely out and I might be picnicking with friends rather than whittling away at the three shopping bags full of books I just purchased at MIT Press’s annual loading dock sale. Reading is a self-imprisoning vice, when it isn’t paired with social or physical experiences. Take Jessa Crispin’s advice to a reader asking why he or she has “suddenly come to hate books”:
My guess is that maybe you’ve been neglecting the right half of your brain. It needs love, too, and reading is a seriously left brain activity. The right brain might be sabotaging you until you entertain it for a while. It loves flirting, and Bourne movies, and the Art Institute. Try baking a cheesecake, or sit on your floor with a box of crayons for a day. Then try again, but maybe something a little less intense than Herodotus. When I’m sick I always regress back to Christopher Pike books, so get back to that level. After a week or two of zombie teachers and man-eating cheerleaders (in a literal sense, not, you know) you’ll be back to Graham Greene.
I think you learn a lot more about a person based on what they won’t read than what they haven’t yet. Life is too short for Jonathan Safran Foer or any other thirty-something Brooklyn novelist. While, I generally like anyone who enjoys JG Ballard books, I also tend to like people who think they would like JG Ballard, but haven’t gotten around to reading his books yet. I haven’t read any Will Self, but I imagine I’d like him, from what I’ve read about him.
But when I do read Will Self, why will I? Why else but for that blissful experience of thinking new things and what Emerson says of regaining discarded thoughts — a passage, which upon a second reading seems to reinforce Brottman’s thesis:
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Those eureka moments are somewhere between chocolate and sex in terms of pleasure, but what besides those three things guarantee joy in this world?
Related links
- Mikita Brottman’s “On Reading” for HuffPost
- Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies
- The Future of the Book blog on Against Reading
- Nerve interviews Brottman
- The Nonist’s Hot Library Smut.
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