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Musings: The Disconnect Between What Kids Want and What Teachers Recommend

Table with sign that says "Need a Book? Check out thes authors and titles that Mr. ____ recommends" with a number of books face up on the table.

The reason I went back to school after working as a children’s librarian in a public library was that I noticed that sometime around grade four kids stopped coming to the library, They were too busy, they had too much homework, they had stuff going on. Even programs carefully designed around their interests weren’t attracting those kids.

 

I wanted to reach those kids. And I was willing to quit my job and go back to school to reach them where they were– school– a captive audience I could finally reach. And I did. But even in 2005, the librarians were the first ones to go when the budget got sliced.

 

In grad school and through 2005 I was part of a children’s choice committee for grades 4-6. We had a list of books proposed that we had to read, evaluate, discuss, and eventually choose 20 books for our nomination list. Kids who read at least 5 could vote for their choice for  best book. And the book with the most votes won the award.

Where am I going with this?

I currently volunteer in my kids’ former middle school library.

In early February I was asked to pull teacher favorites for a display. These included many of what would be considered classics- To Kill a Mockingbord, Night, The Call of the Wild, 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only two of them had been written since 2005.

 

In mid-February, a teacher put a table of best books out on a table These were great choices I would have no problem recommending.  But I recognized almost all of them as books I had read while on the children’s choice committee. Only a few had been written in the last five years. One (Scythe) is taught as required reading at the high school.

 

We are not reaching teachers. They may be tolerating or even accepting horror in their classrooms but many aren’t promoting or providing horror genre titles to their students. And teachers have a huge influence on what gets checked out. It has to be a cooperative effort. The media specialist had a virtual visit with students with Lorien Lawrence in February, but on the day I came in, his books were still on the shelf.

 

I have helped the media specialist pull and promote scary and horror-themed books in the past. At the elementary, there’s time for storytelling to shape readers. But that isn’t enough at the secondary level. How do we reach teachers, especially at a time when giving kids books is so dangerous?  It’s time to think outside the box.

 

Editor’s note: I have had this characterized as a “diatribe against teachers”. It’s not. Teachers have a difficult job that is being made harder by conservative school boards and state legislatures. There is currently an effort to pass a law that would criminalize teachers and librarians for giving students “inappropriate” books in my state. Many school and classroom libraries have been cleared away elsewhere. 

Teachers face the difficulty of finding reading material their students will find relevant and engaging within challenging restraints. 20 years ago I was working to convince other school librarians horror was relevant and had the potential to be engaging to their students. Today there’s a Librarian’s Day at StokerCon: librarians are engaged in collection development  and promoting the horror genre. I am asking, where do we, as members of the horror community, go from here? What can we do to help? 

Posted on March 3, 2023 by , Reply

Musings: Choosing Your Adventure: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

 

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0385541213

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook,  audio CD

 

The Starless Sea starts with a book-loving graduate student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is writing his thesis on video games, finding a mysterious book of stories in his school’s library that includes a description of an incident from his childhood about a door he saw but didn’t open. Off he goes to find out more about the book and how he comes to be in it, that early on involves discussions of narrative and the differences between how it works in written works and in games. An inquisitive librarian tracks down information on the book for him, and between her help and a lot of searching the Internet, he is able to use clues from the book to connect it to a literary masquerade taking place in New York City in just a few days. Shortly, Zachary is on a quest, and the masquerade turns into a mystery, a chase, and an adventure that gives him the opportunity to walk through another door.

Once through the door, it is permanently closed behind him, and a different story begins for him. Zachary has entered a Harbor on the Starless Sea, an underground world where books and stories are safely kept. He is in a maze, or maybe it’s a hotel, or a library, with many doors, some locked and some open, where paths in time sometimes cross and sometimes do not, and people who meet in one room may not see each other again after leaving through the door. In addition to the Keeper and Zachary, there are just a few other people who appear in the underground world behind the door: Rhyme, the last guardian of the stories; Dorian, who may or may not be Zachary’s savior, killer, or true love, or a combination; Allegra, who wants to close all the doors so the story of the Starless Sea can never end;  Simon and Eleanor, lovers who lost each other in time; and Mirabel, their daughter. All of them appear in different incarnations across different times and spaces as Zachary travels through the lands of the Starless Sea, and the sea itself.  The world Zachary enters is dark, empty, often lonely and sometimes frightening or beautiful. His purpose once he arrives is unclear: even the Keeper of the Harbor doesn’t know, or want him there.

Erin Morgenstern writes gorgeous, lyrical, visually evocative prose. She started out as a visual artist and you can really tell from the way she has used words to create her worlds on paper. And if you are a person who loves books and stories and storytelling, who has always wanted to go through a portal or door to adventure, that might be enough for you to fall in love with this book. The weakenesses in plot and characterization are serious flaws, though. While Morgenstern starts out strong, once Zachary is through the portal, we lose the thread of his quest and it doesn’t get picked up again for a very long time (although there are a number of nods to the Narnia books throughout). There are multiple side stories that make you, as the reader, want to know where things went next, like the story of Simon and Eleanor, which has one foot in our reality for at least part of the time, and the story of the innkeeper falling in love, which feels like a fable but might not be.

The tales and fables in The Starless Sea are transformative, tragic, bleeding and dark. I was willing to try to track Zachary, as the anchor to the narrative, through his adventure because I wanted to know how some of these stories connected with his, but in many cases they were just vignettes, with the threads left hanging, or they returned in another incarnation. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, Morgenstern, having constructed this elaborate, recursive story,  suggested that Zachary, the Alice in this wonderland, might be an unreliable reporter. That is, that nothing I had experienced (as a reader) with him could be trusted, and that he might not actually even be in the world of the Starless Sea. Although she backtracked shortly after that, it derailed the story. Once it’s out there, it can’t be unsaid.

Morgenstern was able to create a fairytale atmosphere, but in attempting to make her characters archetypes, she weakened them to the point that it was hard to care what happened to them, and this betrayal of the reader made that even more difficult. In constructing and connecting multiple layers and versions of potentially linked stories that reflected the possible choices of the characters, she left them adrift.  In interviews she has said plot is her weakness, and that she knew she had shortchanged her characters, and that’s really obvious here.

Because of Morgenstern’s amazing worldbuilding and gorgeous writing, and because I think she had some really interesting things to say about the way we structure stories in books (where the reader has a single path), versus games (where the player has many choices and can try different ones if the first ones don’t work), The Starless Sea was worth getting lost in. I feel like Morgenstern tried to present what it could look like to see what happens when a character makes different choices (like going through a door or not) by giving us a bird’s eye view of what it could look like to see the branchings and connections, outside the format of a game or a “choose your own adventure” book.

It’s an interesting experiment, but the observer’s position is unsatisfactory to me when I’m reading for enjoyment.

In adventure games, you get to be the active participant making decisions and dealing with their consequences.  “Choose your own adventure” books are written in second person, making “you”, the reader, the decision maker, with the ability to go back through your chain of decisions and change them, hoping for a different ending (getting to make your own choices is so vital that Chooseco just developed a series of board books). I just wasn’t invested enough in Zachary’s story to want to watch him make decisions (often random) without having more direct interaction.  Storytelling, if it doesn’t involve the reader or listener directly in participation, engages us when the storyteller invites us in. As gorgeously written as The Starless Sea is, it didn’t feel inviting to me as a reader. While the author created a memorable fictional world, she never opened a door.

 

Posted on May 1, 2020 by , Reply

Musings: Read What You Want: The Genre Reader’s Bill of Rights

I’ve always disagreed with romance readers that their genre gets the least respect of any, because look at the way horror readers and writers get treated.  There’s this perception that horror writers must be terrible people to come up with the kinds of stories they do (so many are surprised to find how kind and generous many are, and also how many are teachers), and that the readers are mostly loser teenage boys. Women and girls who like horror get incredulous looks, like, why would they read stuff in a violent genre that frequently portrays them as victims? If you live entirely inside the horror fan community maybe you don’t get these baffled looks and prejudiced opinions about your reading and writing, but maybe, like me, you have to interact with people who don’t get why you would read or write or review this stuff.

I am not solely a horror reader, though. I read a lot of different types of books. I could give you a list of all the genres and topics and styles that I read in but it would be really distracting and isn’t really my point.   There is no shame in reading what I want to read. And so when I come across a group of readers and writers in a genre I read mocking another genre (like romance) I’m pretty done with it. I have been reading romance since I was a teenager, long before I was a mother, and I object to having it described as “mommy porn”.  Nor am I a fan of the extremely outdated perception of romance being read only by clueless housewives. The horror fiction genre should be so lucky as to get the number of authors published and create the kind of money and level of fandom that romance fiction does.

One reason for the existence of this website was that my husband, Dylan, saw a gap in what libraries offered to readers, and in what librarians knew about horror fiction, and he knew that horror could attract kids and teens to reading who had never shown any interest in picking up a book. Horror can kickstart reluctant readers, and librarians and libraries needed to know that (they still do). Romance can also kickstart readers, though, and just like a love of horror can create a bridge between generations (something you can see in my son even though Dylan is now dead) discovering romance can, too. It’s been a year and a half since my daughter would sit down with me to read aloud, but every night since I introduced her to Marion Chesney, she has begged for me to read “just one more chapter”.  Luckily, Chesney wrote around 40 books before switching to writing mysteries as M.C. Beaton.

I’m not defending romance because it doesn’t need defending. The evidence of its success is right out there for the world to see.  I don’t defend my choice to read horror because it doesn’t need defending. I can read what I want and it doesn’t matter to me what you think about me reading it. But maybe think about why readers of a genre might think their genre needs defending. It’s because somebody, or a lot of somebodies, tried to shame them or tell them their choices weren’t good enough, or were evidence of a personality flaw, as if what they’re reading makes it okay to mock them.  It doesn’t.

You have the right to read the genre book of your choice. And, whether that genre book is horror, mystery, thriller, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, non-fiction, poetry, or something else,  everyone else has the right to read the genre book of their choice as well.

And so as a reminder,  I’m sharing again The Genre Reader’s Bill of Rights, which can also be found elsewhere on this site.

 

The Genre Readers Bill of Rights

  • You have the right never to apologize for your reading tastes.
  • You have the right to read anything you want.
  • You have the right to read anywhere you want… in the bathtub, in the car, in the grocery store, under the porch, or while walking the dog.
  • You have the right to read in bed. Under the covers. With a flashlight.
  • You have the right to carry books in your baggage at all times.
  • You have the right to read in exotic settings.
  • You have the right to move your lips when you read.
  • You have the right to read the good parts out loud to your nearest and dearest.
  • You have the right to refuse to read the good parts out loud to your nearest and dearest.
  • You have the right to read and eat at the same time. (This right, however, does not include the right to use food as a bookmark when you are reading library books. Even if it’s the very best potato salad.)
  • You have the right to read and make love at the same time. (But– depending on local ordinances and regulations– you may or may not have the right to ask your librarian for suggested books.)
  • You have the right to read as many books as you want at the same time.
  • You have the right to throw any book on the floor and jump up and down on it (provided that you paid for it first).
  • You have the right to ignore the critics at the New York Review of Books.
  • More importantly, you have the right to ignore the critics in your immediate family.
  • You have the right to stop reading a book whenever you decide it’s not worth the effort, or that you simply don’t like it.
  • You have the right to refuse to read any book anyone else picks out for you. Even if it’s a birthday present. (This is associated with your right to refuse to wear any necktie or perfume you receive as a gift.)
  • You have the right to skip all the boring parts.
  • You have the right to read the last chapter first.
  • You have the right to read the last chapter first and then put the book back on the shelf.
  • You have the right to refuse to read any book where you don’t like the picture of the author. FINALLY, the Genre Reader’s Miranda Right:
  • If you do not have a genre book of your own, a genre book will be provided for you by your public library.

(–The Genre Reader’s Bill of Rights first came to my attention in library school, on the library listserv LM_NET. I printed it, cut it out, and posted it on my dorm room wall. I do not have the name or names of the person who shared it then. While I was not aware of it at the time, after we started the site, it came to my attention that it shares some elements with Daniel Pennac’s Reader’s Bill of Rights.) 

Posted on November 24, 2019 by , Reply
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