Reading level

[mmcirvin]

kerri9494 talks about the problem of finding reading material for kids who read unusually well and therefore might not match the usual scaling of reading level with age interest of subject matter in children's books.

I was just thinking about this subject in connection with my visit to the new National Air and Space Museum building in Virginia. Some of the planes there evoked memories of a book on aircraft, a Penguin paperback with lots of colorful painted illustrations, that I had when I was very small. I think I first got it when I was in preschool, so I must have only been 4 or 5 at the time. I doubt I understood all the text in it at first, but I happily read it over and over, and it was probably written on about a fifth-or sixth-grade level by conventional standards. My parents got me other books that were obviously written for older kids, and I happily read them.

Yet when I was six or seven and we went to the library, to my parents' chagrin, I insisted on getting books only from the Easy shelf for little kids. Not only that, I checked the same ones out over and over. They were baffled that I kept wanting the same Dr. Seuss books.

I think it was partly what Kerri was talking about: books about airplanes were endlessly fascinating, but when it came to fiction, I just wasn't interested in the subject matter of stories written for older kids.

But it was also that I was a compulsive rule-follower. If a book was actually marked as being for people older than me, either in some indication on the cover or because of where it was shelved in the library, then, by gum, I wasn't going to cross that line. The books for kids outside my age range would probably be unhealthy for me somehow. Little did I realize what everyone in the children's publishing industry knows, that normal kids like the feeling that they're reading something skewed a little older than they are, and that books are usually labeled accordingly.

Come to think of it, I never really got into what would now be called YA fiction, all those books for twelve-year-olds about cool teenagers and their agonizing social issues. What happened after I graduated from the Easy shelf was that I got seriously into fantasy and science fiction, forgot all about reading levels, and didn't particuarly distinguish between Heinlein juvies, Tove Jansson Moomintroll books, and Isaac Asimov stories written for grownups. And after that there was a period in which I read mostly nonfiction.

Comments

[avocado123.livejournal.com]

At the craptastic grade school I went to in Missouri, we had a librarian who organized the entire library into grade levels. Each tall bookshelf was a grade level, which overlapped: first shelf was low Kindergarden, second was average Kindergarden which was the same as low First Grade, then high Kindergarden which was the same as average First Grade, etc. We were not allowed to check out any books except what was on the shelf that corresponded with our own level.

My good friend Lucy found out what would happen if you violated this rule. She checked out "Heidi" on the "average Fifth Grade" shelf when in fourth grade, and the librarian had a fit that lasted a week and involved keeping Lucy in at recess, and storming Lucy's house (without permission) to recover the book.

Fortunately my parents made a point of taking me to the public library to counter the best efforts of the school to keep us stupid.

When in 2nd-4th grade, I loved "The Three Investigators" books and similar fare. I read a lot of short stories in teen anthologies, mostly mystery and sci-fi. But by the time I was in 6th grade, I was out of "YA" books that kept me interested, so I moved right on to Stephen King.

Let's just say that a 12 year old reading Stephen King novels is not a good idea. You can see how I turned out.

I don't think there's a huge market for books for kids who can read well. The market assumes the kids will just read adult-level books.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Right now books of the J. K. Rowling or Phillip Pullman ilk are very popular: YA-ish fantasies written on a sophisticated enough level that many adults will read them, though they may be written down just a little bit. I think that's a healthy development, actually, though some literary critics like to whine about how it portends the infantilization of adults. This is the market that Rudy Rucker was aiming at with Frek and the Elixir, which I enjoyed greatly-- though, Rucker being Rucker, he really pushed the appropriate-for-children envelope in spots, which would probably make it all the more attractive to some smart kids.

The Heinlein juveniles I mentioned earlier would be classed in that category today were they first being published now (as it is, marketing doesn't make much distinction between them and other classic SF titles, which is probably fine).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that these boundaries have always been more porous in SF/fantasy than in other genres (one of the things that makes the ignorant claim it's all kid stuff), so it's not exactly fair to say I didn't read books in the YA category; they just weren't that S. E. Hinton Afterschool Special crap. When I was in the fifth grade or so, I was a great fan of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, which are written on an advanced kid/YA level; I don't remember my fellow students making any particular category distinction between those and The Lord of the Rings, which isn't exactly Pynchon but is keyed more to adults as it goes along.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, now that you mention it, I seem to recall that the librarian at the school I went to from kindergarten through the second grade was very keen on making and enforcing these grade-level distinctions (as was my kindergarten teacher, an old-school rigid thinker who my parents say was scared of me), whereas the librarian at the school I went to starting at the third grade didn't give a hoot and lumped everything by subject.

[arsonnick.livejournal.com]

My teacher let me go ahead and try 1984 in 1984 (I was 9), though she advised that I wouldn't have a clue what was going on...and I didn't. My newly 8 year old is loving all the Harry Potter's, along with some of Neil Gaiman's stuff. I am reading some Kurt Vonnegut to him (God Bless You Mr. Rosewater). I have to explain a lot of the background to him, but he absolutely loves the wordplay. For his last birthday I also bought him a few of the Chronicles of Narnia. He hasn't cracked them yet, but they seem to fill the niche you speak of quite nicely.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Wow, reading "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater"? I'm trying to imagine what that would have done to my head if I'd had it read to me at age 8. Probably good things, though I'd have gotten nightmares about Rosewater's ecstatic vision of the tubular firestorm consuming Indianapolis.

As it was, a fortuitous accident landed me a copy of Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad" at a tender age, and it caused permanent mind damage that made me what I am today.