Week 12: Gateway Books

In this blog entry, I would like to talk about controversial books and authors for children or young people. As you can see in one of my earlier posts, I’m really passionate about encouraging kids to read and one of the questions I found myself asking was whether it was okay to encourage kids to read books which may not be any good quality.

Courtesy Google Images (Ferguson, 2011)

Take for example the Twilight series. The main character, Bella Swan, is not a role model that I would like any young girls or women to be reading and aspiring to. In fact, she’s practically the opposite of what my mum has encouraged me to be – a strong, independent woman with the ability to do whatever I want (within reason obviously) and especially, to have a career, travel and a life of my own before shacking up with some sparkly dude. In fact, I see a lot wrong with just about every character in Twilight, and personally, I think the entire series was written so that Stephenie Meyer could have some Mormon approved soft porn to wank to. No Fifty Shades of Grey for her!

Courtesy Google Images (Unknown, 2012)

I apologise, I’m deviating by being a deviant and rude! One thing that I can’t refuse is that Twilight, however bad I rate it, did encourage a huge range of young girls to read the books. It may have even turned that whole “reading is not cool” crap around at high schools. May have, I make no illusions to knowing anything except when I worked at a school we had to continuously buy more copies of Twilight for the kids to read because they kept reserving it in droves!

I’m now going to make a really bad and inappropriate analogy here. In my mind, Twilight is like marijuana, it’s the gateway drug which will let to the hard stuff, the Literature and books with decent messages (like Harry Potter – friendship and love all the way!). So, by encouraging and allowing young girls to read Twilight, as librarians we then have the opportunity to do two things: encourage critical reading and the option to expand their current reading list.

By engaging in casual discussions about Twilight, we could be surprised at how well the kids have realised how little of a role model Bella is (which is actually what happened to me, I do have hope for the future!) and also to encourage them to questions stories and books and to make them critically reflect on what they have just read.

Courtesy Google Images (MemeBucket, n.d)

From there, we could say – ‘why don’t you try reading this novel which is about this strong, young woman who overcomes great adversity to triumph’ (for some reason all I can think of is Jane Eyre right now). But the option is there, once they get past that first bump of ‘reading isn’t cool, it’s so boring’, we can use this to our advantage and engage with them and hopefully, get them reading more.

I would like to note that young boys will most likely definitely not be interested in reading Twilight, but maybe motorbike magazines, science fiction, horror novels or non-fiction books. As librarians for young people, we need to be talking about what they like and reading it to engage with them. We have great responsibility on our shoulders.

IMAGES

Ferguson, S. (2011, November 16). Twilight book series [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.badhaven.com/books/book-features/books-vs-films-a-twilight-retrospective/

MemeBucket. (n.d). What if Twilight was written [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013, from http://www.memebucket.com/what-if-twilight-was-written/

Unknown. (2012). LOTR vs Harry Potter vs Twilight [image]. Retrieved October 16, 2013 , from http://funny-pictures-blog.com/2011/11/21/lotr-vs-harry-potter-vs-twilight/