LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

t's impossible to get teenagers to read. They just don't have the attention spans anymore. And there are just too many other entertainment options. The era of books, and reading, will soon be over forever. Right?

Nah! Getting teenagers to read isn't impossible, not by a long shot. But it may require some rethinking on the part of us adults.

It's true that today's young readers have a million entertainment options, every one of which is flashier and more immediately engaging than books. But books still offer something that no other entertainment medium does-namely, the ability to get inside the head of another human being, and to actually see the world from his or her point-of-view. Books also activate the imagination, increase vocabulary, and expose the reader to new ideas, in ways that other entertainment options simply do not.

And it's also true that attention spans are down. The pace of life is just plain faster. Multi-tasking is in, which, incidentally, is impossible to do while reading a book.

So how do we get teenagers to read? Short answer: meet them on their own terms. Give them books with a strong plot, engaging characters, and an intriguing concept, all of which combine to form a high can't-put-it-down factor.

That isn't to say that "the reader is never wrong," or that we should dumb books down. But the era of the quiet, slice-of-life novel is over, probably forever, as is the era of the sweeping Dickensian novel, where it takes twenty pages to describe a tea pot.

In short, books for teens need to get to the point. And we need that point to be fresh, dazzling, relevant, and juicy.

As an author of novels for and about teens, I know that many of today's books meet these challenges and more. We're not perfect, but I think most people would be pleasantly surprised by the quality and breadth of the books available for teenagers. Teenagers do still get excited about books; I have thousands of letters and emails to prove it.

But the biggest challenge we authors face isn't from indifferent or distracted teenagers. It's from adults.

It goes without saying that the choices we adults make as individuals directly impact teenagers-that if reading isn't central in our lives, it definitely won't be central in the lives of teens.

But I'm actually more concerned about the choices we make as a society. I travel a lot, speaking about my books, and one thing I hear repeatedly is how drastically school and public library budgets have been cut in recent years. One librarian recently confided to me that her district's budget for new books this year is "zero." Apparently, administrators often ask, "Why do we need new books anyway? We've got whole libraries full of perfectly good books, books I loved when I was a teenager-books like Island of the Blue Dolphin."

Unfortunately, books have a shelf-life. Some stories are timeless-and more power to em!-but most aren't. They go out-of-date, either in terms of subject matter or style. Teens pick them up and are immediately put off. Sure, continue to teach the classics in classrooms. But if we want teenagers to read for pleasure, every school and public library also needs to be well-stocked with a wide variety of contemporary books.

To make matters worse, when adults do provide teens with contemporary books, they're often attacked by well-meaning, but misguided adults who challenge the offerings as inappropriate, usually for "offenses" that are far milder than anything the typical teenager sees on television, or hears in the hallway of his or her school. Some of my own books have been controversial because they portray Gay people sympathetically, but others are challenged because they're perceived to promote witchcraft, or they have the occasional swear word or sexual situation, or they take evolution for granted.

In other words, contemporary books for teens have become another skirmish in the ongoing cultural war. So is it any wonder that buying more of these books is a low priority for most library and school administrators? It's no exaggeration to say that if we want teens to read, we have to start supporting their freedom of individual choice. More of Getting teens to read not impossible, says local Gay author @  Seattle Gay News