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Gateway Reading?
Oct. 23rd, 2014 08:09 amSo Rebecca Mead has an article in The New Yorker about whether Percy Jackson is an effective "gateway" for children to better reading.
It sounds all very well - critical but not alarmist - until you start to think about what the gateway is supposed to be to. Do we really think of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as what we expect reading Riordan to lead to? (I'm familiar with Riordan: my 12 year old daughter is a Percy Jackson aficionado.)
Why not Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods, which is far more "like" Riordan than the D'Aulaires? Why not Hawthorne's Wonder Book, in the whimsical retelling category? How about Mary Renault? For that matter, I had read Penguin Book translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid by the time I was 12. ( I confess to not having read the Metamorphoses until much later.)
Should we really expect a YA book to act as an immediate gateway to something directly connected? Is Percy Jackson the first step on a road leading directly by way of adult modern novelists such as Mary Renault via epics all the way back to reading the Agamemnon in the original?
Does anyone expect that reading a haunted house book along the lines of R. L. Stine will lead directly to House of Leaves via some connected set of intermediaries? Or that reading X the Y Fairy will lead to Crowley's Little, Big ?
Sure, it's nice if Riordan will inspire one in a hundred children to be a budding classicist. But in general reading one YA book or series is part of a general exploration of a field of YA books - some a little better, some a little worse. And even for the young adults who keep reading into their adult lives for pleasure, many are likely to stick to a diet of bestsellers which have no more "value" than Riordan (and in some cases arguably less - c.f. Dan Brown).
In my daughter's case, her Percy Jackson reading is associated with (I won't say led to, as the associations are more complicated) reading other YA authors such as Sarah Maas and Gail Carriger.
So the complaint comes back to that overly-familiar deprecation of popular fiction in favour of literary fiction; and there are so many well-known problems with that that I'm not even going to bother going there.
It sounds all very well - critical but not alarmist - until you start to think about what the gateway is supposed to be to. Do we really think of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as what we expect reading Riordan to lead to? (I'm familiar with Riordan: my 12 year old daughter is a Percy Jackson aficionado.)
Why not Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods, which is far more "like" Riordan than the D'Aulaires? Why not Hawthorne's Wonder Book, in the whimsical retelling category? How about Mary Renault? For that matter, I had read Penguin Book translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid by the time I was 12. ( I confess to not having read the Metamorphoses until much later.)
Should we really expect a YA book to act as an immediate gateway to something directly connected? Is Percy Jackson the first step on a road leading directly by way of adult modern novelists such as Mary Renault via epics all the way back to reading the Agamemnon in the original?
Does anyone expect that reading a haunted house book along the lines of R. L. Stine will lead directly to House of Leaves via some connected set of intermediaries? Or that reading X the Y Fairy will lead to Crowley's Little, Big ?
Sure, it's nice if Riordan will inspire one in a hundred children to be a budding classicist. But in general reading one YA book or series is part of a general exploration of a field of YA books - some a little better, some a little worse. And even for the young adults who keep reading into their adult lives for pleasure, many are likely to stick to a diet of bestsellers which have no more "value" than Riordan (and in some cases arguably less - c.f. Dan Brown).
In my daughter's case, her Percy Jackson reading is associated with (I won't say led to, as the associations are more complicated) reading other YA authors such as Sarah Maas and Gail Carriger.
So the complaint comes back to that overly-familiar deprecation of popular fiction in favour of literary fiction; and there are so many well-known problems with that that I'm not even going to bother going there.
