There were two articles in the NYTimes that I thought might be of interest.
The first, yesterday, was about the publication of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. I'm somewhat torn about these books: they have little in the way of redeeming characters or good lessons, but they are hilarious and Tim loves them enough to read them, and re-read them, on his own.
The second, this morning, reports that fiction-reading is up among adults. The statistics are still terribly depressing, especially considering that reading on-line fanfic counts as reading fiction, at least for the purposes of their study.
2 comments:
Thanks. Those were interesting.
Re: article 1. I remember your review of Wimpy. Interesting that even the author doesn't consider him a role model in any sense of the word! And is it slighly older Captain Underpants humor? Or rougher, iykwim? I'm still all
for boooks that get kids reading, one would hope kids would be able to differentiate the behaviour they should use, rather than mimic bad.
Re: article 2. I just saw a thing on the news about library usage up because of the economy. And a sad statistic that they only require they respondent to have read one book/poem/etc in the past twelve months. It's such a part of the fabric of my life...even the daily paper...do that many fewer people subscribe anymore that you can't even say that?
They have the gross-out humor of the Captain Underpants books, but there are some more middle-school issues, such as popularity and girls. It's probably pretty realistic in that the main character is an unremarkable kid who tries to get away with stuff.
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