The Guardian's children's books pages had an article this week by a former librarian, Ellen Ainsworth, entitled 10 books to help boost young boys' reading. They are good suggestions, and we have them all, but perhaps they are a little obvious (Harry Potter, Alex Rider etc)? Bev Humphrey, a Literacy, School Libraries and Technology Consultant, certainly thinks so and has countered with her own post My 10 books to help boost young people's reading. (As you can guess from the title, she also takes issue with the restriction to boys.)
What do you think? I'll certainly be using Bev's post and the very useful comments (some of them!) below the Guardian article to enhance our own lists, particularly Books for Boys.
The slideshow below is of the 10 titles, or series, recommended by the Guardian.
Books for boys? How about Theresa's Breslin's 'Dreammaster' books e.g. http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/dreammglad.htm - the dreammaster himself is a strong father-figure, and presides over the adventures in time-space of the boy-hero Cy. More excellent writing appealling to boys in Alan Ahlberg's 'Woof' (boy turns into a dog), and the Ian Serraillier classic 'The Silver Sword' (Escape fropm Warsaw), which might be a bit old-fashioned these days, but is a good Second World War story and has worked with boys I've played it to as an audio book in the car (boys who wouldn't listen to the the Diary of Anne Frank for example - I tried, they rejected it...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Sword.
ReplyDeleteAll good ideas, thanks, we'll look at those. We have the Dreammaster series in our Fantasy list:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.strath.ac.uk/jhlibrary/sr/childlit/childrensbookliststhemes/magical/
And a colleague (I think) is about to include the Silver Sword in a World War 2 list. I read that several times as a child (which was some time ago) but it's still being borrowed,and we recently bought a new copy to repalce the old, tatty one. Definitely a classic.