Let teenagers read the books that they love
I WAS 15 when Harry Potter and The order of The Phoenix was published and remember some adults at the time saying it was too long and too dark. The same was later said of the books that followed, especially Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. as you read the sevenbook series, the novels certainly become longer, more complex and (as the central characters grow up) far more concerned with adolescent relationships. This is why they appeal to so many teenagers. We’re now being told J. K. rowling’s books are examples of literature that aren’t sufficiently ‘challenging’ and are contributing to a decline in pupils’ reading skills (Mail). I suppose by ‘challenging’ books, Professor Keith Topping, who led the study, means the ones we see on the ‘literary novels’ shelves in bookshops, rather than among the ‘general fiction’. Is this strange book apartheid a challenge in itself: ‘Step forward, bold reader, pluck the chosen tomes from the shelf and you shall inherit the Kingdom of Books — with full bragging rights’? all children are different, but reading skills can decline as reading for pleasure falls off as we get older, and there are various reasons for this. for some, there are simply too many other things to enjoy more than books. for others, studying novels, poems and plays in every last detail in secondary school English lessons makes serious literature unappealing, intimidating or boring. for most teenagers approaching their exams, there’s so much detailed reading they must do for revision that they don’t feel like reading ‘challenging’ books for pleasure. Contrary to popular belief, most pupils revise hard for their GCSEs, and there comes a point when they want to read what they want, not what they should. The experts like to name the books young adults should study, but it’s none of their business what their favourite books are. anyone of any age should read what they enjoy. EMILIE LAMPLOUGH,
Trowbridge, Wilts. younG people are supposedly avoiding ‘challenging’ books in favour of ‘soft’ options, but what counts as a ‘challenging’ book for secondary school pupils? I’m 17 and, in my experience, it’s just a book that doesn’t appeal to me. If I enjoy it (as I did alex rider, Harry Potter, ulysses and lord of The rings), I don’t find it challenging, just stimulating. If I struggle with it, as I did with Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, anna Karenina and Wolf Hall, it still wasn’t ‘challenging’, just not my kind of thing. Is a ‘challenging’ book one I don’t enjoy, but which I feel I ought to because others do? It’s easy to blame the plethora of ‘basic’ books for falling reading skills, but the causes are more complicated than that. I couldn’t care less if Professor Topping thinks Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows wasn’t good enough for my age at the time. It didn’t have a negative effect. life’s too short to read things you don’t like just because academics are looking down on you.
DANIEL WHITE, Liverpool.