The Myths of Teenage Readers
Mare Aronson
Tomes are clearly back on the map, and figuring out what they are
reading, and how to match them up with books matters to librarians, book
and magazine editors, authors, and critics. My observations and commentary
are aimed at finding the source of our ignorance in our own adult assump-
tions. As an editor of books, many of them aimed at teenagers, it has been
possible to gain experiences and insights to focus on this special age group.
For years, working in the book publishing community required a kind of
faith—faith that there were authors who would want to write superb books in
a genre that is often ignored or held in contempt; faith that there were readers
eager for those books; faith, ultimately, that books could matter in the lives of
young people who have grown up with every other form of media and enter-
tainment. Ihave also found that many people share my blind and willful trust
in both reading and adolescents. These observations were born out of a myth—
not Chronos, or Osiris, or Yggdrasi!—but the far more modern and pernicious
kind of myth that shapes our lives. Not very long ago, I would come to the
editorial meetings in which new book acquisitions were approved by the higher.
ups and marketing management. There I would hear: “blacks don’t buy books.”
This was astonishing. Important people running large companies were living
in a myth-suffused haze in which prejudice defined perception. Hearing some-
thing like that stops you in your tracks. It is so far from reality, yet it is
expressed with complete authority. And these beliefs matter. For a time, it was
difficult to publish black-oriented books because of this reigning faith. Luckily,
the market, the talent of black authors and artists, the active interest of critics
and librarians, as well as conscientious efforts by editors such as Phyllis
Fogeiman, did what I, as a powerless junior editor, was unable to do: show
that the beliefs that were governing publishing and were deemed market facts
were nothing but an amalgam of prejudice, fear, laziness, assumptions, and
stories. In other words, a myth was masquerading as a truth, and out of iner-
tia, bias, or fear, people bowed down to it. Today, there are myths in publish-
ing that are just as powerful and just as pernicious, and that is why it is time to
Address for correspondence: Mare Aronson, Senior Editor, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 115 West 18t
Street, New York, NY 10011.explore realities. I believe that our state of knowledge about teenagers, and in
particular about teenagers and reading, is equivalent to what it was when
recycled prejudice about black Americans passed as market truth, and I can
prove it. Here are the statements that are most commonly made about teenag-
ers and reading: “Teenagers don’t read” or sometimes modified to “teenage
beys don’t read.” “Teenagers over the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.” (fill in
the blanks) “only read adult books,” sometimes modified with the addition of,
“at least that’s what I remember.” Finally, “Teenagers have too much to read
for school; they have no time for recreational reading.” Listening to those three
beliefs spoken out loud, you can’t help seeing that they are contradictory. If
you aren't reading, you certainly are not reading adult books. If you are read-
ing adult books, it means you do have time after your homework is done.
Contradictory as these statements are, they have provided a kind of comfort to
publishers, booksellers, and library directors. They were a built-in set of ex-
cuses for not trying, for making no effort to reach teenage readers, especially
older ones.
There may be some level of fact behind each one of these beliefs. That is one
thing I hope we can explore. But that deesn’t resolve the contradiction. The
problem isn’t that each statement may be partially true. It is, rather, that they
are each stated as if they were total and final truths that set standards for how
and what we should publish. In other words, whatever their origin in life, they
have become sacred myths. Why is that? Why do we treat these myths as
truths? I think it is because they fit certain adult needs and attitudes.
The first myth—“Teenagers, especially boys, don’t read”—is a mixture of
fear and nostalgia. The fear is that teenagers will rict replicate us, will not carry
on the values and traditions we care about. It is an expression of our fear that
we haven't done our job well as parent, teacher or librarian. We haven't made
reading central, so we don’t trust that the next generation will treasure it. [ say
that because a second’s thought will show that teenagers, especially boys, read
a great deal. How could they install new PC programs, pass driving tests,
select precisely the right clothing and look, know all about their favorite teams,
stars, musicians, and even writers if they weren't constantly reading? That is
where nostalgia comes in. When we say reading, we mean literary fiction.
“Teenagers aren’t reading,” then, really means, “I fear that even though I want
to believe I loved great novels when i was young, I haven't loved them enough
as an adult to pass that along to the young. Perhaps my regrets about not
having read more will come back to haunt me in the form of a generation that
doesn’t read. If only teenagers read more, I would feel better about reading
less.” Myth one shows nostalgia and anxiety about our heritage.
Myth two, that teenagers over a certain age only read adult books, is a
different kind of projection. It is another combination of fear and hope. The
greatest anxiety teenagers inspire in adults is a fear of oss of control. This
almost-child is being let out into the world just at the point where he or she
could do or suffer real damage. Saying they only read adult books is another
kind of resignation. It says, we can’t hoid them back and we are intimidated6 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 2000
by them. They know too much already. Adult books, in that sense, means that
parents turn their teenagers over to the whole adult world of experience, of
media, of temptation. it is true that teenagers are ever more sophisticated,
which must be daunting to parents. Parents no longer have a clear line over
what is or is not appropriate for a teenager who has certainly had sex educa-
tion in school as weil as on TV, through friends, family, and Calvin Klein ads.
But this sense of being defeated by, and resigning in the face of, teenagers’
difficult urges is nothing new. Shakespeare put it very well in The Winter's
Tale, a play all about the bonds of love, stating: “I would there were no age
between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for
there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the
anciently, stealing, [and] fighting.” With Shakespeere, parents wish young
people would sleep from before puberty until after college, when they can
earn a living and help pay off debts. If reading adult books hurries along that
happy day, all the better. Yet there is also a twist here. A parent might fight
over, not merely accept, a teenager's interest in other purely adult forms of
media. Why not with books? Because books also still carry a kind of cultural
authority and hope. Parents are proud to report that their children are reading
adult books, while few would boast that cute kids are sneaking into X-rated
movies. If the way in which teenagers are taking in the adult world, the for-
merly forbidden world, of sexuality, of deviance, of evil, or strange beliefs, is
through adult books, at least there is a kind of maturity in that. By mentally
passing the teenager over to adult books, and simultaneously agreeing to ig-
nore him or her, the parent both gives up and hopes that the young person is
moving on. If they are reading explicit books, at least they are adult explicit
books. In a singular cocktail of resignation and magical thinking, adults en-
trust their silent, uncommunicative, dangerous teenagers tc adult authors, as if
those writers could serve as a new kind of nanny, ushering their progeny into
the adult world. Adults would like to think that in as much as teenagers are
reading, those books are helping them to get into college or to make adult
decisions. A book or magazine directed at a teenager that engages with adult
issues is somehow more threatening than an adult text that ignores the teen-
ager and treats the same themes. One is seduction; the other is a healthy
stretch. Here another kind of prejudice enters the scene. We are just entering
the generation of parents who have read real YA books as teenagers, and now
have teenagers of their own. Too many parents from earlier generations as-
sume that any non-adult literature is just a weaker, watered down, less liter-
ary, thus less useful form of adult books. It would be the very rare parent who
would say, “My sixteen year old wants to read adult books, but I really think
he'd do better with Chris Lynch.” The adult wants to hold him back to Trea-
sure Island, or send him on to Cold Mountain. David Elkind, a professor of
child and adolescent development, was quoted on the Internet describing an-
other version of this strange squeeze, where parents want teenagers to grow
up, and yet aiso not be adult quite yet. The spaces for adolescents have van-
ished, malt shops and seda fountains in drugstores are a thing of the past, asAronson 7
are large movie theaters. Although malls have proliferated, young people are
not always welcome in these places. There ate fewer and fewer places for
young people just to congregate with friends and at the same time, there has.
been an explosion of space for adults. The one kind of space that there is for
teenagers, and ever increasingly so, is in the media—on MTV, on WBN, on the
radio, on the Net. Books could be, and magazines often are, that kind of space.
They could offer a chance for congregation with friends as teenagers discuss
them, but few adults see them that way. Adults don’t recognize the need for
teenage physical space, and so they don’t see the need for teenage cultural
space. Pat Hersch, the author of A Tribe Apart (Bantam, 1999), quotes one
teenager as writing, “there is an unspeakable distance between youth and the
grown-up world.” One reason for this distance can be found in Elkind’s in-
sight about the growth of adult territories. Adults keep expanding the psycho-
logical space they need for self-expression. Adults enter ever more deeply into
their own conflicts over sexuality, abuse, relationships through confessional,
memoir, therapy, talk shows. They insist on working out their own adoles-
cence as adults. All the more so as they go through divorces, with all of the
antagonism they can bring, and create recombined families. But, at the very
same time, these adults want their adolescent progeny to behave like children.
They want rigid codes for schools, for behavior, for literature. What they are
exploring in themselves is exactly what they want to prevent in their children.
‘That is one kind of parents. The other cannot set any standards at all, for they
know all too well how they once broke their own parents’ rules, and even now
struggle with their adolescent impulses. Monica and Bill, which read like a bad
YA novel, is a perfect example of this teenage adulthood writ large. Whether
through repression or resignation, adults simultaneously eclipse, erase, and
ignore young people's reality. No wonder that, through college age, young
people want tutions to set rules, to be in ioco parentis for parents who
weren't there before.
That harsh judgment leads directly to our third myth, “Teenagers have no
time for recreational reading.” To fear, nostalgia, ignorance and anxiety, we
add rigidity. When I decided to organize a conference for the Center for Pub-
lishing of New York University in March 1999, I realized it was important to
know what books schools assign to teenagers. I asked a librarian friend named
Michelle Missner to conduct surveys, I put out the question on the Net, and I
learned about Arthur Appiebee. He is a professor at SUNY-Albany who has
studied in great detail the required reading in nearly every kind of high schoo!
in this country: urban and rural, large and small, private and public, secular
and religious. Not only that, he has found similar studies dating back to the
turn of the century. (For an entry point to Arthur Applebee's work go to http:
//cela.albany.edu from there you can navigate to read individual studies, or
see his 1993 NCTE Research Report Literature in the Secondary Schools: Stud-
ies of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States.) Applebee has found a
core list of required books that is nearly invariant, and nearly immobile. The
most recent book on the list is Lord of the Flies. William Golding was the last8 Publishing Research Quarterly / Fall 2000
‘one let on board, for his combination of insight and talent. He was, you might
say, the final gift of the last large and powerful generation of liberal teachers.
Just after that came the multicultural splits. Bocks were subject to communal
judgment and taste. Any book that one group might like, another would pro-
test, so teachers were happy to freeze required reading in the past and the
deep past. An April 1998 article In Language Arts by Julie Wollman-Bonilla
argued that middle school teachers and teachers in training most frequently
objected to books that featured other than dominant beliefs, or stressed racism
‘or sexism as social problems. if you are going to eliminate such books, you
have effectively blocked off modern literature. Yet, I am not sure we should
blame current teachers or over-praise prior generations. Applebee's long-term
conclusion is that required reading in high school hardly ever changes; just a
book or two is taken off every ten or twenty years, and another is added.
Individual schools and teachers are much more adventurous, but Applebee
was looking at the core reading list, the heart of the heart of the high school
experience. He has proven tha? schools have codified, made permanent, an
absolute division separating what teenagers are assigned to read, what they
experience in daily life, and the literature of their time. I am net reviving that
old fight between ancients and moderns. And, personally, I em in favor of
giving young readers a far greater exposure to classics. I just think they should
read those classics alongside contemporary books. As several good teach:
oriented-textbooks, such as From Hinton to Hamlet by Ted Hipple and Sarah
Herz, make clear, oid and new comment on each other. Instead we erect a wall
between them. The one good thing about this wall is that it creates a hunger in
teenagers for texts that do speak to them. If the classroom cannot provide that,
they seek it in the library, on the Net, at the newsstand, or in the bookstore. If
we really believed that teenagers had so much to read for school that they
couldn’t read anything else, every one of us would be at our local school
boards fighting to expand the required reading list. It is only because we know
teenagers are not limited to what they are assigned that we can tolerate the
sclerotic conditions of the schools.
‘The myths I have just described show how scared we are of teenagers, and
how ignorant we are about what they are actually like, or could be if they had
the chance to fulfill their potential. But there is something a bit dated about all
of my finger waving because things are starting to change. Our sister media,
television, music, magazines have begun paying more attention to teenagers.
Therefore, book publishers are all trying to figure out how to get into the act.
In 1999 it was the very first time the American Library Association actually
gave out an award for the best book for readers ages twelve to eighteen, the
Mike Printz medal. The LA Times announced last year its first-time-ever prize
for YA fiction. There are even rumors that the chains might eventually recon-
sider their insane devotion to shelving teenage books deep inside the children’s
section. The question still remains why most bookstores only have a children’s
section and the rest of the space is devoted to books for adults. Could YA
reviews in major newspapers be far behind? What may, in the long run, proveAronson 9
even more exciting than any of our efforts is what is going on in the small but
growing number of teenage reading groups. Whenever teenagers get to books,
and get to talk about them, the results are amazing. I think that, with a little bit
ganization, we could have a revolution on our hands, as groups of teen-
age readers around the country read books, discuss their reactions in person or
by email, and create a national conversation in which the prejudices of adults
have almost no role. When they read and talk, our most firmly held myths
simply evaporate. I began with myths precisely because we are now beginning
to recognize these so-called truths as dubious, flawed, and incomplete. The
problem is we don’t yet know what to replace them with, or how much truth
they contain, or how to proceed once we wipe away our sleepy old habits. My
set of commeniaries about
teenagers, but as the eginni ing of a set of questions we need to ask ourselves.
If we have not been able to pass on the culture of reading, why have we failed?
If we haven't failed, why are we so worried? The industry data documents
that there is only marginal growth in the number of books sold despite all the
noise about online booksellers building incremental sales volume. If we are so
worried, why are we so resigned? I suspect that by the end of the day, even if
we know nothing more about how to bring teenagers and reading together,
we need to explore a great deal more about our own assumptions, beliefs, and
attitudes. As we saw in the sixties, consciousness-raising is always the best
place to start.
The main findings of last year’s conference turned out to be how little we
actually know about teenagers and reading. Academics reported the lack of
good research on teenage reading, and the absence of any valid data on how
teenagers read on the Net. Librarians tracked the disconnect between teenag-
ers’ interests in, say, nonfiction, and the books that get starred reviews. Media
analysts from MTV and Phillips (a leading manufacturer of interactive de-
vices) disclosed surveys which showed reading to be much more popular
among teenagers than anyone had expected. They also revealed that Gen-Y
kids are eager for all sorts of ideas and experiences, if sometimes overwhelmed
by them ail. They are quite different from their bleak Gen-X older siblings who
were more alienated from any form of media they did not create themselves.
Teen magazine editors reported truly fabulous hit rates on their sites, ad
no clear policy on including book reviews in print or on line. Since then, one of
the most popular magazines, TeenPeople, has given its name and support to a
teenage book club. The conference made clear that the long night of YA de-
cline is ending. But that leaves it to us to clear away the encrustation of misin-
formation and mythology that had become enshrined as truth. That leads to a
final question. Why is it that publishing in general, and publishing for younger
readers in particular seems so prone to establishing “rules” that authors, edi-
tors, reviewers and librarians, treat as proven when their origins are murky,
their validity is tested only by personal anecdotes, and they are rarely subject
to public debate? If nothing else, I would urge readers te question what they
“know” to be “true” about teenage readers, and where that knowledge comes
from.
ca