How (not) to make a book recommendation

I have a few other blog posts I've been thinking about, but this whole BitchMedia/100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader snafu has gotten my hackles up, and nothing inspires writing like raised hackles.

I had seen a couple comments about the 100 Books for the Feminist Reader, but hadn't had a chance to check it out yet. I generally enjoy lists like that, however--I use them in deciding what the read or order for myself and my library.

And then Bitch Media got a few complaints about a few books and pulled three books from the list (power of your convictions FTL!) and then everything exploded. There are some really thoughtful and eloquent comments on the article itself (including several by YA authors asking to be removed from the list), which I was reading last night until the mansplainer troll showed up, and I had to stop because I value my health.

I won't get into how aggravating and lame Bitch Media's waffling on this issue has been, as that's already been said much better here and here. If you want a more thorough overview, or if you feel your blood pressure is too low, go read those posts.

I had been assuming that the list had been made by someone who had actually read the books she was recommending, which ended up being a less than accurate assumption. Which, in my book, is a cardinal sin of book recommendation. You can not recommend something you haven't read. It's like saying, "Those shoes are really comfortable, I saw them in a magazine once" or "That restaurant's excellent, I've seen the sign they have."

The only book list I create in any official capacity is my Summer Reading list. And I AGONIZE over it. Seriously, I lose sleep. I'll usually start with an initial pool of a hundred books and eventually winnow it down to twenty, carefully trying to balance the list. And I'm never sure I've gotten it just right. So I tweak and tweak and eventually have to set a final list because having your Summer Reading list come out in September is ridiculous. This is for an audience of about 180 students.

I take book recommendations seriously. I haven't read every book in my library (though some students seem to think either I have or I should), so when it comes to recommending books to students I rely on my catalog and reviews I've read in order to fill in the gaps. If I can recommend something I've read, great. But when I put a book in a student's hands that I haven't read, I say "I haven't read this, but this is what I've heard about it." Because recommendations carry weight, and they are about trust. A student asking me for a book recommendation is trusting me to help them with a decision. And yes, one book choice is a small decision, but relationships--with me, with reading, with libraries and librarians--are built on decisions like that.

That's how seriously I take recommending one book to one student. It's a fairly limited audience. I'm fairly certain Bitch Media has a larger audience than that, yet they don't seem to take that responsibility very seriously.

Bitch Media--and anyone else interested in making a list of recommended books, for that matter--if you don't have the time or interest in taking this responsibility seriously, find someone who will. There are lots of us out here who do this kind of thing professionally, and we'd be happy to help.

Is lavender-lined white paper something I, as a girl, should know more about?

I don't normally write about what I'm reading, mostly because I can barely even manage to update my GoodReads more than once every three months, but I feel compelled to write about Robert B. Parker's The Boxer and the Spy. And not for good reasons.

I am, for the most part, enjoying the story, and I will be booktalking it in the near future. But some the language Parker is using is just a) taking me out of the story and b) ticking me off.

First, "crap" is used and referred to as if it's a big bad word, which wouldn't seem quite as ridiculous if the main character didn't use the word "fag" quite so casually. But I'm not going to say much about that, as I have another post I'm working on that's all about swearing (you might want to skip that one, Mom).

The thing that pulled me right out of the book was a reference to the female lead taking out "a piece of lavender-lined white paper" and then, just a few pages later, using "a Sharpie with lavender ink that matched the lines on her notepaper."

Really?

I, of course, Googled "lavender-lined white paper" to see if this was really some sort of cultural phenomenon that was sweeping the nation. For that exact phrase I got exactly one hit. I'll let you guess where it came from. When I broadened the search a bit I found some more references, all to papers that included pictures of fairies, or were lavender scented, or had a pattern of lavender flowers. I did find a couple references to using lavender-lined paper in a special writing project in a middle school. But no indication that there was any particular reason why the lavenderness of the lines on the character's paper (and her matching Sharpie!), needed particular emphasis.

Except, of course, to point out that she's a girl! Who's taking notes! And isn't that adorable!

Abby, the character, is otherwise fairly well-drawn and dynamic. She's smart and assertive and can go toe-to-toe on multiple levels when talking Terry, her male counterpart. And this whole lavenderosity seems thrown in to remind us that she's actually feminine--as if those other traits of hers are somehow not feminine--and that's why Terry is in love with her. There's a very "girls can be smart, but it's even more important to them that things have pretty matching colors, and that's really why boys like them" tone to it. Barf.

I may have been a bit more tuned into these language choices because I was reading Maureen Johnson's amazing blog on gender and reading earlier (which you need to go read right now. Seriously. I'll wait. She says everything I've ever wanted to say on the subject, only better), but I've come across this before, and it's always just so. . . obnoxious. If pointing out the color of the lines on a piece of paper is the only way you can think of to point out that the character is a girl, you need to outsource the writing of female characters to someone who understands that many girls have favorite colors that aren't pastel.

Why books still matter

I am sure there are several posts about David Brooks' recent column lurking in my GoogleReader, but since they're amongst the 300 or so other unread items in my school account, I haven't read them. Which is probably good, as I'd like to come at this without everyone else's opinion rattling around in my brain. I know, from the snippets of discussion I've caught on Twitter, that much is being made of his discussion of Internet use; I find that part of his argument interesting and thought-provoking and occasionally annoying, but I'm going to leave them alone.

I want to talk about the books.

The study he refers to reminds me of a couple studies I remember reading about in library school; I'm going to be a little light on details, as all of my notes from grad school are in my office, and even I don't have unhealthy enough a work-life balance to go into the office on a Sunday in the summer.

Anyway. There were two studies, about reading and about having books in the home. The studies showed that children with more books in the home had higher educational achievement, but the gains did not necessarily seem to be tied to more reading. Children whose parents took them to the library and read to them frequently did not show the same kinds of gains. While reading to young children was important and had an impact, it seemed that in order to get the full effect you had to actually have the books physically in the home.

And of course there are all sorts of socioeconomic factors in a study like this that you can't isolate for that point to other reasons why children who had books in the home fared better educationally.

But it would seem that having books--physical books--matters. Why? I think Brooks gets it right by saying it wrong here:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

So, yes. The physical presence of the books matters. 'Cause you can't see yourself as building a home library unless you physically have books in your home to put in that library.

For all the arguments about "digital natives" and kids being "wired differently" these days, it seems that some things haven't completely changed yet. I know plenty of students who read a lot--articles, blogs, Wikipedia, etc.--online, but who still don't think of it as "real" reading; they talk about themselves as readers when they pick up a physical book. Will that change eventually? Probably. But it hasn't yet.

And maybe my students--for whom print presents such a barrier--are different. For many of them, printed words have for years been something inaccessible;they stayed away from words out of frustration, or shame, or because when they tried--and struggled--they were called stupid. And the words that they were denied access to were printed in physical books. So granting access to the words--more so than words on a screen--was a mark of significant achievement.

When I talk with colleagues about the role of the library at a school for students with learning disabilities, the word dignity comes up a lot. And it's a word that I take seriously. Students know that "real" schools have libraries, and having a "real" library at their school--a library with books, a library where they are welcome--matters to them more than I can explain.

So why is it that students seem to think of themselves differently--and appear to achieve at higher levels educationally--when they have books?

Part of it is self-perception, and part of it is the perception of others--or really, a student's interpretation of how others perceive him. If, for years, you've gotten the idea that others don't think you're worthy or capable, giving you a book--particularly one that comes with the understanding that the giver believes you are fully capable of reading it--changes things. It's a vote of educational confidence.

The Internet is, compared to the book, in its infancy. While there is a lot that is of educational value available online, most students' primary interactions with online content is not educationally-focused in the strictest (or even loosest) sense of the word. It just doesn't (yet) carry the same weight as a printed book.

And until it does, the printed book will still have a very important--even if primarily symbolic--place in education.