Sex and other reasons why we ban books for young people

15 September 2015 by particularkev

A prize-winning New Zealand novel for teenagers has been effectively banned because of complaints from Christian lobby group Family First. After the decision by the country’s Film and Literature Board of Review, Bruce Dawe’s Into the River is now subject to an interim ban that prohibits its supply, display, and distribution.

Into the River is the first book to be banned since the current law was enacted in 1993. The novel confronts important subjects like bullying and racism through its narrative about a Maori boy. As the winner of the 2013 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, it is in some respects a surprising target for censors.

Into the River has been classified in several different ways. It was initially judged suitable for audiences over 16, then received an R14 classification at the beginning of 2014 (making it an offence to supply the book to a child younger than 14), which was overturned last month.

On making the R14 determination, the Board of Review acknowledged the book’s “useful social purpose”. The Board concluded it was “likely to educate and inform young adults about the potentially negative consequences that can follow from involvement in casual sex, underage drinking, drug taking, crime, violence and bullying”.

Nevertheless, the Board felt that younger readers without a sufficient “level of maturity” were at real risk of being shocked by “powerful and disturbing scenes”.

In 2013, Family First sought an R18 classification and shrink-wrap covering because of the book’s sexual content, representation of paedophilia and drug taking, and use of swear words. Leader Bob McCroskie must have been busy with the search function on an ebook, as he noted that “it’s a book that’s got the c-word nine times, the f-word 17 times and s-h-i-t 16 times”.

When most people think of book censorship, they imagine political regimes and potentially book burning in Nazi Germany. What is little considered is that most books that have been challenged or banned are books for young people.

Book burning in Nazi Germany

The American Library Association’s list of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books of 2000-2009 includes dozens of books for young people. Eight of the books or series named in the top 10 are children’s or young adult titles.

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series occupies the number-one position because of its depiction of magic. Christian schools across the United States, United Kingdom, and even some in Australia, have refused to allow the phenomenally popular novels about the boy wizard to circulate in their libraries.

What Harry Potter shares with four other titles in the top 10 is that it is a series. Series books for young people are typically understood as having little educational value or literary merit.

L Frank Baum’s Oz books, for example, were removed from numerous public library shelves in the United States throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As Laurie Langbauer explains, librarians believed that series fiction like Oz was:

mass-produced, commercial, interminable, formulaic, and repetitive […] had no redeeming value and would harm any children exposed to it.

Books for young readers are often challenged or banned because they conflict with adult perceptions of childhood innocence. Depictions of sex pose the most obvious threat to adults’ understanding of the sacred space of childhood.

Judy Blume’s teen novels were highly sought after in my primary school because of their discussion of puberty and developing sexuality. Four of her novels appear on the challenged books list from 2000-2009, even though the most recent of these was published more than three decades ago.

Blume began publishing in the 1970s and has pointed out that this period was more open to discussions of teen sexuality. Her controversial novel Forever, she explains, was:

used in several school programs then, helping to spur discussions of sexual responsibility.

Blume laments that her novels would never be used in this way today. In 2013, she used her fame to assist after The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (number 10 on the ALA banned list) was removed from one Chicago school district after a complaint by a parent about sexual content.

Into the River has received literary awards and praise that distinguish it from popular series fiction. The New Zealand Review Board even highlights its potential to educate young readers. It has been reclassified and now banned because sex troubles adult ideas about what young people should be exposed to in fictional stories.

While age recommendations for disturbing content in books for young people are potentially useful, legal restrictions and bans are mystifying and fruitless for several reasons.

For one, young people can readily access adult fiction in public libraries and via ebooks. An obsessive focus on the books specifically marketed to young people ignores the mature themes, such as sex, drugs, violence, and horror, that they are free to explore elsewhere.

Second, young people access mature content in a range of formats, including largely unregulated internet sites and videos, and in video games, which aren’t usually expected to have an educative function.

Finally, through gritty realism and challenging content, books such as Into the River attempt to appeal to a demographic of teen boys who are reluctant readers. If the harshness of life for Indigenous, working-class, or sexually abused teens is too disturbing for adults to accept, then we would be better placed to improve these lived realities than condemn their representation in stories for young people.

Michelle Smith, Research fellow in English Literature, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Google Books

15 September 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that takes a look at Google Books.

For more visit:
http://teleread.com/chris-meadows/google-books-did-not-fail-it-succeeded/

Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen, and the definition of literature

14 September 2015 by particularkev

Annie Coral Demosthenous, University of Western Australia

Last month in The Guardian, with a piece headlined Get Real. Terry Pratchett is not a Literary Genius, literary critic Jonathan Jones claimed Terry Pratchett’s books should not be read, because they are not literature:

Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.

Jones informed us that he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett, because his time was better spent reading Jane Austen. In presenting Pratchett and Austen as polar opposites, Jones made certain lazy assumptions about both the nature and function literature, which deserve to be challenged.

Jones’ article irritated many, and has drawn criticism for reinforcing an elitist and exclusionary definition of culture, based on the assumption that there is a singular definition of “literary” fiction independent of the reader’s individual experience of either life or reading.

Yet the definition of “literature” is changeable, and inextricably linked with fashion. As the author Christopher Priest has pointed out, works now considered classics were not necessarily defined as high culture when they were written, and works considered literary when published do not always survive over time.

Priest also observes that many classics began life as popular publications – the story of Americans waiting at the wharf to discover the fate of Little Nell springs to mind. What is missing from this debate is direct engagement with Pratchett’s work and its relation to literary high culture.

So what is high culture? And what do we mean when we call something “literary”? According to Jones, “actual literature” is “harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort”.

As this definition is not particularly helpful, let us consider some characteristics commonly considered “literary”: the elegant and adventurous use of language, engagement with themes of universal significance, inventiveness of style, defiance of genre classification.

Jones accuses Pratchett’s prose of being “very ordinary”, missing Pratchett’s delight in locating the extraordinary within the ordinary: his writing is simultaneously clear and complex, much like Austen’s. Both are masters of aphorism; compare for example:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife (Austen, Pride and Prejudice).

To:

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it (Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment).

Both are wry observations of human nature, and both make the reader stop and think.

Pratchett seldom allows language to exist unchallenged; words are stretched and twisted by new and surprising contexts, opening the reader’s eye to the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, often eliciting surprised laughter.

The Truth (2000), the 25th Discworld novel, reflects on the meaning of “truth” and people’s propensity to look for it, structured around the aphorism that “a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on”.

William, a compulsive truth-teller, sets up the first newspaper on the Discworld, and discovers that the truth is hard to find. He is horrified when readers assume everything printed in the paper is true, assuming “otherwise they wouldn’t let them put it in”.

The novel concludes with the statement that “nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth”. This challenges readers’ assumptions about objective truth, but positions it as ephemeral rather than non-existent.

Pratchett’s writing style is economical, elegant and adventurous. In The Truth, he takes the same approach to chapters as Joyce takes to punctuation in the final chapter of Ulysses (1918): he doesn’t use any. Instead, a multitude of episodic narratives fit together like scenes in a film, jumping between characters, location and time without losing the narrative thread.

The Truth begins by tracing a rumour flying through the city of Ankh-Morpork: “The dwarfs can turn lead into gold”. As different characters hear the rumour, (alchemists, wizards, thieves, the dwarfs themselves), the image of both city and world emerges. The rumour, like a panning camera, stops when it reaches William.

Pratchett’s work is often underestimated because it is classified as “genre fiction” rather than literary fiction. Yet Pratchett’s relationship with genre is complex and adversarial. He does not reproduce genre stereotypes, he sets them up to be deconstructed, or at least affectionately mocked.

Rincewind, the original Discworld hero, is represented as completely un-heroic: a cowardly wizard who cannot do magic, or, indeed, spell the word wizard. He is joined in his adventures by Cohen the Barbarian, now old, toothless and suffering from lumbago, who nevertheless is still a more successful hero than Rincewind.

Austen often flirts with genre in a similar way. Northanger Abbey (1817) is a mock-Gothic romance, which satirises the stereotypes of Gothic fiction by reproducing them and then allowing reality to intrude. The novel begins with a discourse on Catherine’s unsuitability as heroine, listing the characteristics one expects of heroines and locating their absence in Catherine.

When visiting Northanger Abbey, Catherine goes looking for manifestations of Gothic tropes, and is disappointed at every turn: the hidden papers she finds are laundry receipts, the old Abbey has been restored and redecorated, and her love-interest’s mother was not murdered, after all.

Austen’s novels are no harder or easier to read than Pratchett’s; both use wit and satire to carry out social critique, and in both cases people who don’t find them funny tend not to enjoy them.

Reading Pratchett, like reading Austen, requires commitment, and a willingness to look under the surface. It’s a shame Jonathan Jones was unable to do so before writing his follow-up article on Pratchett – for which he had, belatedly, read one book by the author – this past weekend.

Annie Coral Demosthenous, Honorary Research Fellow, European Languages and Studies, University of Western Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Reading teaching in schools can kill a love for books

14 September 2015 by particularkev

Ryan Spencer, University of Canberra

Reading instruction in the classroom is a key concern for all teachers and there are many ways to go about it. However, is our determination to achieve excellence in reading skills in our children killing their love and enjoyment of a good book?

In my work with parents, I am frequently asked the best ways to encourage and motivate reluctant readers to be engaged with books. Parents report that their children return home from school with no inclination to pick up a book and read.

Any avid reader will gladly talk about the joy of curling up with a good book to read away the hours on a cold, rainy afternoon. Reading a good book is one of life’s greatest pleasures. We need to share these experiences with our children and adolescents in order to assist them in developing into strong and capable readers.

How widespread is this concern about the destruction of reading enjoyment?

As I have written previously, the use of boring, mass-produced home reading texts in children’s early years at school can be seen as the beginning of this negative cycle.

As children progress through their schooling life, there are many other instances of learning reading skills that don’t help to celebrate or foster reading development. As NAPLAN tells us, getting the reading skills required simply to access these assessments isn’t always an enjoyable experience for students. Frequently, teachers feel the pressure to give their students “just enough” in terms of reading strategies to be able to access the test, which leaves little time to focus on reading for pleasure.

Kelly Gallagher, a high school teacher from the United States, outlines the term “Readicide” in his book by the same name. He says it’s:

the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.

It is clear that the destruction of reading for pleasure is not contained to US schools. When introducing my first-year pre-service teachers to the amazing collection of literature by Australian author Shaun Tan, audible gasps of displeasure are frequently found.

Kids should know this about books.
demotivation.us, CC BY

The Lost Thing is a multilayered visual text recommended by the NSW Board of Studies for students in years seven through to ten. Students recount their experiences of weeks spent analysing the key themes, ideas, imagery and concepts within the pages of this text.

The Lost Thing is an excellent example that illustrates all of these concepts; however, students comment that the length of time studying and analysing different components discourages them from looking at it or anything similar again.

Recent research also indicates that many pre-service teachers are inclined to follow the traditional literacy practices that they have experienced in their own education, which can often have negative connotations for their future students.

While teaching children and adolescents key concepts for analysing and evaluating texts is important, the manner in which it is done and time that is spent on this can lead to disengagement.

As Donalyn Miller notes in her book Reading in the Wild, schools aren’t to blame when it comes to not arresting students’ lack of interest in reading, but they have an important role to play in fostering reading enjoyment.

How do we encourage our children to read for pleasure?

Children (and adolescents, and adults) need to know that it is okay to read whatever they want, when they have the opportunity to do so. Giving children the chance to read whatever they like when shopping at the bookshop is a great place to start. If you are picking up a book to take home to your child as a gift, purchase a few, so they can choose something that interests them.

When parents are avid readers and actively talk about books with their children, they are establishing a climate at home where books are valued. Discussing your favourite books and parts of books with your children can lead to the discovery of new reading material about shared interests.

When your children bring home required reading, whether it be home readers or a set text for class, make sure that this isn’t the only reading they do. Provide incentives for your child to want to return to books of their own choice, in order to foster their interest in reading.

By helping our children and adolescents recognise the need for reading practice at school and the joys of reading for pleasure at school and home, we are giving them the best possible opportunity to develop the skills that they will need to be literate, passionate readers.

Ryan Spencer, Clinical Teaching Specialist; Lecturer in Literacy Education, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Feel Less Busy With Books

13 September 2015 by particularkev

The link below is to an article that argues spending time with books makes you feel less busy.

For more visit:
https://hbr.org/2015/09/how-making-time-for-books-made-me-feel-less-busy

Australia is awash with political memoir, but only some will survive the flood

9 September 2015 by particularkev

Jane Messer

Last year more than a dozen political memoirs were published in Australia. From Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister to Greg Combet’s The Fights of My Life, from Rob Oakeshott’s The Independent Member for Lyne to Bob Brown’s Optimism, one could be forgiven for thinking Australia is a nation of political junkies.

Or that we’re fascinated by the personalities, policies and procedures that shape our political landscape. But are we really, and if not, why so many books?

The deluge shows no signs of abating, with a similar number of titles expected this year. Already we’ve seen the release of Shadow Minister Chris Bowen’s The Money Men, reflections by Federal Labour members Mark Butler and Andrew Leigh, with former Victorian Labour leader John Brumby’s practical “lessons”, The Long Haul, in press.

Liberals, once laggards in this genre, are stepping up in growing numbers. Federal Minister Christopher Pyne’s “hilarious” A Letter To My Children is out, and Peter Reith’s The Reith Papers is underway. Also in press is the genuinely unauthorised Born to Rule: the Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull.

First nurtured by John Iremonger of Hale & Iremonger, Melbourne University Press now leads the way with the genre. MUP Director, Louise Adler, is notorious for her enthusiasm and her efforts to contract politicians of all parties and persuasions. But even Adler has reservations, writing in September’s Meanjin that “the political memoir is unabashedly myopic, subjective and reflexively partisan”.

Tony Abbott, then Federal Oppositon MP, signs copies of his book during the launch Battlelines in Sydney in 2009.
Dean Lewins/AAP, CC BY-ND

One argument for the proliferation of political memoirs is that they enable the public to engage with politicians outside the frenzy of the 24/7 news cycle. Certainly the popularity of Annabel Crabb’s ABC show Kitchen Cabinet suggests there’s some weight to this “getting to know the person beyond the sound-bite” theory.

Some argue the 24-hour media cycle has debased politics to such a degree that voters are searching for a depth of focus missing from parliament and mainstream media coverage and finding it through other channels.

Based on the sales figures, a publisher can safely bet that an Australian political memoir or biography is likely to pay its own way, at the very least. Even the slow ones mostly sell more than a few thousand copies.

But do sales say anything meaningful about these books’ impact on our political process or cultural debate? And how to measure the impact of the political memoir on democratic process?

The genre has been trending for a few years now, propelled in no small part by the success of Bob Hawke’s The Hawke Memoirs (1994) which sold 75,000 copies, and John Howard’s Lazarus Rising (2011), which sold upwards of 100,000.

As far back as 2007, David Marr in his analysis of John Howard’s prime ministership, His Master’s Voice: the corruption of public debate under Howard, despaired of the increase in public “chatter” and the sabotage of free speech. Paradoxically, it was during this period, and subsequently, that political memoirs and biographies increased in number.

Thanks to the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2002 and its collection of reliable national book sales figures, metrical research into the book industry and reading patterns is now possible.

But what readers make of the content of these books, and how they contribute to Australian culture, is difficult to accurately discern.

Dr Jan Zwar conducted a close analysis of a range of narrative nonfiction books and their contribution to cultural debate during the Howard years 2003-2008. In an essay for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature she observed that “experiences of the actual readers remain a mystery behind the wall of data”.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard launching her book My Story in Sydney, 2014.
Dean Lewins/AAP

Other forms of media mediate the relationship between the memoir, its author and the wider readership. Syndicated publication of extracts, the author’s appearances through radio, television, online and print media to discuss the book, and appearances at writers festivals and festivals of ideas are all channels key to ensuring the possibility of the memoir’s broader ideas being promulgated.

In her 2012 essay More than Michael Moore: Contemporary Australian Book Reading Patterns and the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Zwar proposed that it is through these “longer term, less obvious ways” that these texts have discursive impact.

Former PM, Julia Gillard, by way of example, has appeared at half a dozen writers festivals in Australia and New Zealand alongside her memoir, My Story (2015), although no one I spoke to nominated the memoir as being influential or contributing to the debate. Yet, with large live audiences, Gillard clearly is contributing.

The memoir is the prop for the event, and contributes to an already existing discussion of broader “Gillard” topics such as women in politics and education reform.

Similarly, Anna Bligh, former Premier of Queensland, speaking on the ABC program Q&A in August, firmly linked her memoir, Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival (2015), to her key message of encouragement to young women to pursue a career in politics, and not to be fearful of the walls “built of the solid bricks of prejudice” (to quote from the book).

The Latham Diaries by former federal opposition leader Mark Latham go on sale in Sydney in 2005.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Mark Latham’s Latham’s Diaries, originally published in 2005, eclipses all other political memoirs and autobiographies in my research for impact, in terms of readers recalling and engaging with its dissection of the Labor Party in the post-Keating years, the Australian political system more broadly, and its insistence that there ought to be serious debate about political philosophy.

Whatever one may think of Latham today, this memoir has contributed to debate and critiques of Australian democratic process in the new century. Natalie Mast recently argued on The Conversation that, ten years on from its publication, “the flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us”.

It is both the specialist and the general reader that the politicians are appealing to, with general readers contributing the bulk of sales, and thus the economic viability of the genre. But it is the political analysts and historians, journalists, lobbyists, festival directors, politicians and would-be politicians who are the most critical readers of these books and who enable a memoir’s impact.

Laura Tingle, the Australian Financial Review’s political editor, has possibly read them all. According to Tingle, the “young things” in the current caucus are “hoovering up” Gareth Evans’ Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary (2014) to gain an understanding of how the government worked.

Knowing what happened is not of course equivalent to energetic debate and discourse, but it is a starting point.

Ex-Foreign Minister Bob Carr signs his Diary of a Foreign Minister in Sydney in 2014.
Jesse Matheson/AAP

Tingle nominated three other books of influence from recent years. Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2013) continues to “reverberate” as readers realise it has not clarified Abbott’s beliefs, but just added to the mix. Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies (2014), which followed on from his Political Memoirs, is having impact because of the quality of its insights and argument, though strictly speaking it is not a memoir.

Tingle also nominates Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014), despite it blowing up across social media over Carr’s love of activated almonds and other personal nonsense about his abs and pyjamas. But from Tingle’s perspective, Carr’s diary holds value for its uniquely positioned observations of the Gillard cabinet.

You effectively had an outsider/ journalist reporting on what he saw in a government that was crumbling. For that reason, I think it is going to be an on-going source for many years on what happened in the Gillard period.

Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and co-author of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, pointed to other works as influential, but again, they’re not wholly memoirs, nor all recent: suggesting the genre does indeed have limitations.

Simons identified the Latham Diaries, the late John Button’s 2002 Quarterly Essay, Beyond Belief: what future for Labour (part memoir, part critique), and thirdly, Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts’ 2015 Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment.

Too young to be documenting their political lives through memoir, this pair are not looking back, but forwards.

Jane Messer, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.