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The Power of Mediocre Children’s Fiction
Reach back in your mind to the time when you emerged as an independent reader. You could choose your own material, and didn’t have to rely on others to read it for you. What stories did you prefer? For some of us, the books that drew us in weren’t sophisticated. In fact, there’s a good chance the books you’re recalling were formulaic series that publishers cranked out at high volume. Although it’s tempting for parents to steer their children toward richer literature, there is a case to be made that you actually derived benefit from your obsession with Superman comics or your seven weeks in a row of checking out Babysitters Club books.
Students who learn ably to read and write early on, and then build on that knowledge exponentially throughout their education, are ones who enter Kindergarten already primed with a large vocabulary. This vocabulary development comes from regular conversation with loved ones at home, life experiences such as outdoor walks and petting zoos, playtime with other children, and hearing books read aloud.
With such a stimulating and varied daily life, children build a network of long-term memories through which to interpret anything new they come across. The more they know — the greater number of connections they formed — the faster new information is meaningfully processed and assimilated. A child’s knowledge can be expressed and demonstrated in terms of vocabulary, words with their attendant associations and indication of familiarity with a domain. Any book that increases that word-hoard, filling out familiar concepts and introducing new ideas, strengthens the mental network and thus lays the groundwork for further learning. In sum, reading mediocre children’s fiction makes you smart.
Learning new words in context is difficult; the research tells us that we have to encounter the word many times before it becomes part of our vocabulary. When you were lounging with that middling story back ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more, you were grappling with words and their associations, creating mental layers that now give precision, depth, and clarity to your communication. Furthermore, our brains give favored status to stories, lending the takeaways from your reading extra vibrance and permanence.
A strong vocabulary builder was, in my case, the Nancy Drew series. I didn’t read all of them, but I did binge on them occasionally in my preteen years. They were especially beneficial for me as someone who hadn’t fully lived in American culture. I could learn and experience it second hand through these works and others.
Nancy was a character who had it all — looks, smarts, boyfriend, confidence, a car. Her father was a handsome lawyer, and wealthy. Anytime Nancy needed to go somewhere to solve a mystery, she and her friends could pack and be whisked to an exciting new destination. Nancy could pick up on any new skill immediately — acting, playing tennis. Circumstances always ended well for her and criminals were always apprehended. Nevertheless, this character took me places and showed me new things I would not otherwise have come upon for some time.
The first Nancy Drew book I picked up was Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes. I was eight and was absorbing all the newness of my first semester of boarding school. This book with the pretty young woman on the cover, playing bagpipes in a kilt — I think I already had bagpipes, Scottish, kilt in my head — was a promising read. Next was Password to Larkspur Lane. That one I remember for its introduction to the ideas of nursing home, visiting hours, perhaps password. (Really? Hospitals in America had only certain hours when you could visit? Picky and strict!)
Other words acquired from the series were as varied as Nancy’s adventures: amateur, phantom, titian-haired, kachina dolls, false bottom (as in a secret compartment). There was a criminal with pale blue eyes that startled me to contemplate pale blue eyes as perhaps being pretty, but in this case meant to confer more creepiness on the bad guy. I had thought blue eyes were desirable. I also less consciously absorbed the idea of describing a character’s physical traits to indicate the non-tangibles. I still reflect on pale blue eyes occasionally, especially when I see examples of what the writer must have been thinking.
Just a survey of vintage Nancy Drew titles shows the enormous variety of ideas young readers encountered: Stagecoach, dragon, mannequin, locket, quest, ranch, tolling, moonstone, ivory, sapphire. The attractive covers, the range of settings and contexts, the fast-paced narrative with suspenseful chapter endings, and the scary parts gave rich meaning to the words and a permanent place for them in their minds.
Published in General
I’m not convinced that reading is the best way to help kids grow intellectually. If reading made people smart, I’d be the smartest person around. I read constantly. It has not made me smarter.
And I would think an afternoon with a microscope would do more to increase the knowledge of a child as an afternoon with Judy Blume.
I think the quality of the literature and reading matters as much as reading in and of itself.
And I can almost guarantee that the executives and editors in the children’s book publishers, the good ones anyway, are not giving their kids the Sweet Valley Twins.
Even the “new” Nancy Drew books that came out way after the original series were terrible. I was appalled at the subject matter the publishers drew upon for those later books.
We need to give kids the best literature we have.
Oh, I loved the Bobbsey Twins!
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is one of my all time favorites.
Well, I don’t know about the homeschooling circles you run in, but in mine, evolution is a theory that helps us to understand the current model for how varied life came to be on the earth.
So, not subversive.
Instead, we’d ask you to teach bio next year and start this year finding a good textbook…
I seem to have enjoyed an odd selection of literature in my pre- and early teen years. Looking back, I think this was because a lot of what I read was selected by my father–Sherlock Holmes, Horatio Hornblower–or were books I found in my my grandmother’s attic when I stayed there on holiday from boarding school–John Buchan and Richmal Crompton come to mind.
I was especially fond of Richmal Crompton’s William stories, featuring the irrepressible British schoolboy William Brown, and his nemesis, the revolting Violet Elizabeth Bott (“I shall thcream and thcream until I am thick . . . . “).
On my own (I think), I found the Anne Shirley series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. My mother contributed the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series. When I was in sixth grade, my Aunt gave me a copy of The Hobbit for Christmas, and over the next couple of years I worked my way through it and the trilogy.
I seem to have enjoyed stories about smart, self-sufficient, interesting boys, girls, men and women (and hobbits, I suppose), and I seem not to have had much of a taste for soppy romance.
I’ve always liked good writing, though, at no matter what age. And that remains true.
My suggestion for a pedagogical moment — talk to your kids about Suzanne Collins’ use of first person present tense to create an unreliable narrator in Katniss Everdeen. The books practically run on her not seeing what would be obvious to an outside observer until the correct narrative moment. It’s useful not only as a narrative tool for the plot but also for teaching self-awareness. (e.g. Katniss shouldn’t have needed Gayle to be upset at her kissing Peeta to realize that Gayle had feelings for her. My theory is that Katniss is a PTSD survivor on page 1 from her father’s death and the family’s near-starvation, because otherwise she’s borderline autistic in her inability to connect with other people emotionally.)
Wow. I’ve always associated that particular technique with Dan Brown.
I’ve never read any of the Hunger Games series. I almost always have difficulty with books written in the present tense, though. I think it’s pretentious, or maybe something else that I can’t quite pin down. I’m not sure what the point of it is. Do other people have the same issue or is it just me? (It’s OK if it’s just me, I can take it).
Eh, so I’ll cop to reading portions of the Sweet Valley series. They were literary junk-food, sure, but aside from one scene involving teenage drinking (or rather, the protagonists’ decision not to drink), I can’t remember anything particularly scandalous about them (no sex scenes in the ones I read, and any indirect references to sex or drugs had to be too indirect for me to get).
Still didn’t keep me from reading most of The Federalist Papers at the same age, or from appreciating Yeats and Shakespeare a few years after that.
I think it’s OK for reading to be a mix of edification and escapism. Even the most harmless forms of escapism can be overdone, of course. But if reading for escapism is a bad habit, it’s one of the least bad habits out there.
Loved Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. Don’t remember how I stumbled onto to Anne of Green Gables, but that series was my favorite!
Also read Little Women and, later, Gone With The Wind over and over. (The first time I read GWTW, at about 14, my grandfather mocked me, “Oh, you’re trying to struggle through Katie Scarlett?” No, Grandpa Grant, it was no struggle – thank you very much!)
Side note: My grandmother gave us a tome entitled (I think) Book of Children’s Literature. I took it out to the backyard one summer’s day when I was about 10 or 12, and stumbled upon “Casey at the Bat.”
Color me SHOCKED when I read the last stanza!
Just last night I read Anne of Green Gables Chapter One, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Surprised” to my three youngest… so much fun that book.
(I finally finished our outloud Lord of the Rings last week…)
I’m sure you’re right. And I knew some very smart kids who enjoyed them. I don’t think they hurt anyone, and they weren’t any worse than some of the television shows out at the time.
The issue for me was that these books, through the library and book fairs and teachers, were coming from our school. I felt strongly that we could do better in terms of literary merit.
:)
There is no doubt that we should aspire to have our children read good literature. But many times children need the predictability and simpler structure of “good enough” books as stepping stones to developing their reading skills and becoming interested in reading as a leisure activity. Perhaps we could think of such books as literary training wheels.
I do think that it is important to distinguish between mediocre books, such as those discussed above, and junk books, such as the Captain Underpants series. (And I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of the books mentioned in these comments as being mediocre, but to each their own opinions. :) Junk books should most definitely not be the basis of a child’s literary diet.
Again, I would make the distinction between what parents give their kids to read or what the kids pick themselves versus what schools give the kids.
I devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder and enjoyed Diamond in the Window, Little Women, Edgar Eager’s Magic books, and some of the Anne Shirley books. Nancy Drew was object of derisive comments by older siblings so I never really read that series or the one on nurses either.
Currently reading By the Shores of Silver Lake to younger daughter, aged 8, & will soon try Half Magic with her. She has enjoyed Goddess Girls series, anything with magic animals (preferably kitten fairies), Junie B Jones, and a few Magic Treehouse books. This morning she lamented that a classmate beat her to checking out Swiss Family Robinson from the school library.
She is a significantly better reader at 8 than I was.
If you like Edward Eager, you should know that his goal was to get children to read E. Nesbit’s books, whom he regarded as the best children’s author of all.
She’s fantastic. Don’t watch any of the adaptations of her books to the screen; just read them.
In my early to mid teens I read a lot of Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Also some Sherlock Holmes and all the major Poe short stories. (An English professor once told me he thought Poe was the ideal introduction to the world of grown-up reading.)
But I must say that in my grade-school and pre-teen years, I was not a great reader of the kind of series you are talking about. I had several of my brother’s old Hardy Boys books and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books, as well as a stack of horse and other animal books. Tarzan, too. I made several attempts at these, but never got very far.
Instead, the books I devoured were non-fiction. Many were coffee-table type books on aviation and space. Some of the titles were: Modern Combat Aircraft, Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, Wings, What Plane is That?, Charlies Brown’s Third Book of Questions and Answers (on transportation). Also there were various Time-Life series: The Old West, Fighting Jets, Science Library. These were all books that I read over and over, though I never read them straight through.
Those books did more than spur an interest in technology: they also served as a gateway to an interest in history. You can’t learn about MiGs without picking up something about the Cold War. You can’t read about P-51s without getting some WWII, etc.
Couple of YA series I’d recommend for her:
The Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett, starting with Wee Free Men. It’s set in his Discworld series, so as she gets older she can check out the adult books. (The “adult” books are roughly PG to PG-13 in language, sex, and violence — the only reason I’d wait for her to be older is that some get a bit philosophical and raise difficult issues for a kid, like “Why do we teach kids to believe in Santa Clause? Because we have to believe the little lies to believe the big ones like Justice”) They follow the adventures of Tiffany, who starts out as a 9 year old girl armed with only a frying pan and bunch of Braveheart-inspired Smurfs to rescue her kidnapped brother from the queen of the fairies. Solid moral lessons, relatable characters, and incredibly funny as well.
Similarly, the Stephanie Harrington series by David Weber, starting with A Beautiful Friendship. Adventurous 11 year girl discovers a species of telepathic cats. (Okay, that may not be the best copy.) It’s set in his sci-fi universe a couple hundred years before the main plot of the adult novels. (Which are great reads as well — Horatio Hornblower in space — with a great female protagonist. PG-13 on sex and violence, R on language because of sailors talking like sailors.)
My 8-year-old daughter is blazing through Nancy Drew now. She already read most of the Little House Books–started at age 5 or 6, before she could really understand every word. She reads them aloud to herself. (I admit that I like to stand outside of her room and listen to her.)
Inspired by Claire Berlinski’s example, my boy read Animal Farm at 8. (Yes, Claire was only 5 or something, but hey…it’s still pretty young to start on Orwell!)
I’ll second Magic Tree House. Not great quality, but kids in early grades can read them quickly and have the satisfaction of finishing a book. They do have lots of facts–especially the non-fiction research books.
Well, no way to know, unless we find your twin, separated from you at birth and otherwise raised identically but without access to books. We have no idea how smart you’d be if you didn’t read constantly, do we?
For what it’s worth, you seem pretty smart to me.
But I do agree that after a certain age (once kids can read easily and their vocabulary is large enough), it’s important to steer them toward good books. My father was — it seems — stricter about this than most Ricochet members’ parents were. It’s easy to say, “Well, that’s how I was raised, so it’s got to be right,” and I don’t really know — as above — how I would have turned out had he done it differently, but I’m certainly grateful to him for making it clear to me that not all books were created equal and for teaching me why.
It works perfectly as a children’s book. I didn’t understand anything about the political message: I just loved the talking animals.
By the way, does anyone else remember loving The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles as a kid? I grew up assuming it must be a great book because I’d loved it so much. Went back to read it again as an adult, though, and no — it’s awful.
Strange which ones stand up to time.
I had a different sort of journey into reading. I grew up in a rural family. We were quite poor and I don’t remember many kids books around–maybe a few Little Golden books. However, from as long as I can remember, I always had a strong desire to read. When I started school, it was to a small 4-room school in a tiny town. There was no library in the school and nothing for me to read. I can remember asking an older girl riding my school bus to bring home her reading book so I could read it on the bus! Our classrooms had only old readers on the shelves so I read those. I remember the day that the school librarian from the “big school” brought books to our 4th grade class and we were allowed to sign one out each week. I still remember the first book I signed out–some sort of mystery–a genre I still love. That began an almost non-stop reading fest. All the way through school, including high school I read 3 or 4 books a week. When I was about 15 or so, I can remember coming home from a piano lesson with a new piece to learn and a pile of books from the library to read and having such a feeling of contentment.
Mr. C and I were not readers as kids, but I’m happy to report both our girls are terrific at reading and writing, and the youngest has always had an impressive vocabulary. I credit my aunt, my mother’s younger sister by ten years.
My mother was a literature snob. She did read Goldenbooks to me, but when I was expected to read on my own, the only book I remember her offering was The Secret Garden. I still haven’t read it.
But, we spent the month of August every summer with my Aunt Ann here in Colorado Springs. She was a talented English teacher with four daughters around my age. At one end of her kitchen was a row of bottom cabinets stuffed from bottom to top with …. comic books. I was in heaven.
The lesson I took from her was, make everything your kid might read available, and that’s what I’ve always done. When our girls were little, I lined our dining room with shelves of board books and picture books. The oldest would spend a couple hours emptying the shelves and examining every page of every book — at age two!
She’s a senior in high school now and is hoping to get an English degree and become a writer/editor.
Other important factors: reading aloud (we started when they were infants while we were rocking them) and regular trips to the library where they make their own selections.
My aunt gave me one of the Happy Hollisters books when I was about seven. I think I read them all too.
My mom used to take me to the bookmobile when I was young, and I got a book called The Incredible Detectives, about a dog, a cat, and a crow that solve a crime.
I started off with the Chip Hilton sports series, then finished off the Tom Swift, Jr. series, and finally worked my way through all the Hardy Boys books. Mediocre? I think not. Page-turners! Wholesome role models! Heroic athletes! Child scientists! Crime-fighters!
Our teacher tried to stamp out the books, and we actually debated their merits in class. The winning argument turned out to be “building the habit of reading.”
The habit I got into was cliffhanger chapter endings. It took the publishing and media world a while to catch up, but I’m certain that James Patterson, Dick Wolf, etc. owe a measure of their audiences’ loyalty to the long lasting influence of the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s story-telling template.
I read as many Hardy Boys books as I could find in the Library. Jules
Verne’s novels also.
Here stands a proud consumer of multiple Nancy Drew books – I believe I devoured three a week while in the 4th grade. They helped foster my love of reading, along with Laura Ingalls Wilder, Katherine Patterson, Elizabeth Enright, and Scott O’Dell.
I just finished Gone With the Wind for the first time in my 39 years and was shocked at my level of involvement, even obsession, with the story. If you haven’t yet read it, even if you’ve seen the movie, I recommend giving it a go.
Any other late 80’s/early 90’s teens here remember the pulpy series “Merivale Mall?” It was sold through the book fairs in school. I loved those, but talk about fluff! Innocent fluff, though. It followed the lives of several teenagers, detailing mainly the mean girl type drama – new designer clothes, snobbiness, discussions of status – and leaving out any mention of sex and/or drugs.
This is a terrific post and thread.
I can’t help to wonder where’s Our Hostess?
Did She get grounded?
Not to mention helpful survival tips such as what to do should you encounter a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast while vacationing on Traal. (Here’s a hint: it thinks if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.)