It occurs to me that I haven’t talked about my day at the Reading Matters conference last week yet. Not here on the blog, anyway. In ‘real life’ I’ve been chatting to anyone who’ll listen about what a lovely day I had and how I finally got to meet Twitter pals and authors I admire. The evening drinks in the State Library were also a highlight and I was able to have one last walk through of the Look! exhibition before it closed.
In this mind, I thought I’d share something. I took this picture at my local library:
I think it’s a great idea, grass roots crowd-sourcing!
But I daresay this question will annoy some people:
‘Is there such a thing as good YA fiction?’
[Of course there is.]
On that same board, I will add, there are a few notes about vampire novels: ‘What’s a good one?’ ‘Can you please buy more?’ There’s even a ‘NO MORE I’M SICK OF THEM’ note.
It shows how the YA market is growing, and how important it is.
I also recommend this segment from The Book Show last week, ‘New Study Finds Gender Inequality in Kids Books’. One of the statistics quoted (and I do hope I wrote this down right) is that in over a year of books being published, 57% characters are male, 31% are female.
A hypothesised reason for this is to try and encourage reluctant boys into reading. Interestingly, the periods over the last century when the male to female ratio of characters evened out slightly was at the beginning and end – right when the 1st and 2nd wave feminist movements were at their peak.
There are those who are frustrated with this importation of gender politics. In the podcast, Leigh Hobbs is clearly annoyed, I think, about the debate, seeing it all as an “adult projection”. I agree, in part, for when I was a child I read what I wanted, not really caring if characters were boys or girls (at least, after I outgrew The Babysitters Club series).
It’s a thorny issue, one I think bears some thought because for the critics, the scene at it stands now has implications for girls and how they see themselves in a wider cultural sense.
