| From
the November/December 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Where the Boys Aren't
 rowing
girls may leave the Baby-Sitters Club and the American Girls behind,
but as Lauren Adams (“Chick Lit and Chick Flicks”) and
Deirdre Baker (“Airheads”) show us in this issue, there
are plenty of new, and more sophisticated, book-friends to be made
come junior high. We’ve commented on this trendy shade of
pink before (see the March/April 2004 editorial), so here instead
I’d like to speak up for the boys: Unfortunate Events and
Harry Potter behind them, where do the guys go next?
One place they can go is Jon Scieszka’s www.guysread.com.
The website’s search engine is a little peculiar (I looked
up friendship and was offered The English Roses
and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), but the site
also has lots of guy-appealing recommendations, from picture books
about trucks to sports novels, science fiction, and survival dramas.
But let’s also consider the fact that this lively resource,
like most of the wonders of the web, assumes that its viewers can
read and are, in fact, reading as they click from page to digital
page.
If I’m belaboring the obvious in pointing
out that the Internet requires reading as well as viewing, it is
only in service to countering another point made too often and too
broadly: boys don’t read. Even while we busy ourselves hedging
and amending this demonstrably false statement, we tend to dodge
our real complaint, which is that boys don’t read what we
want them to (fiction) the way we want them to read it (quietly).
We might privately roll our eyes at the girl reading the umpteenth
iteration of Bridget Jones Junior, but we are “glad she’s
reading.” We don’t even see the boy leafing through
a magazine or browsing a car manual or website. Or when we do, we
see him as someone who “should be reading.” He already
is. Why the literature we propose for his attention doesn’t
hold it to our satisfaction is a question for us, not him.
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