Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys

[ellen_datlow]

Getting boys to read and continue reading into adulthood is in our whole society's interest (not just authors and editors).

GLW is the site Colleen Mondor co-created along with a couple of dozen bloggers to recommend books for teenage boys. We've partnered up with InsideOut Writers in LA to build a wish list at Powells for the teenage boys held in the LA County juvenile justice system.

You can read about the ongoing project and its two week long special book drive here Putting our Money where our Mouth is

Comments

[vee-ecks.livejournal.com]

Good plan, actually. Guys *do* read in jail and prison, even if they don't read anyplace else.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

And hopefully the habit of reading will stick with them when they get out.

[vee-ecks.livejournal.com]

I haven't noticed that it does, but I'm speaking from a small personal sample, too.

The branches where kids predictably stop reading when they're going to, though - fourth/fifth grade, I think is one, and the beginnings of junior high and high school, definitely - that's where effort needs to be focused, I think.

It's something I've thought about for a while. I don't have any great ideas - my gifts don't run in that direction. Looking at recent successful efforts to attract more girls to science and math and whatnot might help - no similar Boy Power effort has been made in the US in the K-12 subjects where girls do a lot better than boys: English and History/Social Studies.

[vee-ecks.livejournal.com]

I should point out that I was talking about adults in that first sentence: targeting juvenile offenders is a different subject. Kids are still in flux at that age, which makes them great candidates for rehabilitation efforts and whatnot. And the high school years are where the last group of readers stops reading before everything settles out and you end up with the depressing adult numbers on who reads for pleasure and how much and what they read. IIRC, there's a steady decline throughout high school after a big drop at the beginning, as opposed to the other points where kids stop reading, which look like lemmings jumping off cliffs into Nintendoland on graphs.