Deja Varoom

So I heard there is concern that teenage boys do not read so much anymore. Is this true? Or am I mistaken? Regardless, here we have a young man telling the publishing industry what teenage guys want to read:

And then there are the vampires and other supernatural creature that appear in many contemporary teen novels. Vampires, simply put, are awesome. However, today’s vampire stories are 100 pages of florid descriptions of romance and 100 pages of various people being emo. However much I mock the literature of yesteryear, it definitely had it right when it came to vampires. The vampire was always depicted as a menacing badass. That is the kind of book teenage boys want to read. Also good: books with videogame-style plots involving zombie attacks, alien attacks, robot attacks or any excuse to shoot something.”

Zombie attacks. Any excuse to shoot something. I am comforted that despite society’s best attempt to churn out a generation of eunuchs the essential nature of the American adolescent male remains intact. Give that kid some firecrackers and a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (The book, not the silly movie.)

Tenuously related – a critique of a critique of ‘Great Books’ programs.

I read scads and scads of books as a teen that might be described – charitably described – as junk. The trick, I think, is to inculcate the habit of reading.

UPDATE: I felt compelled to add this ode to the books of C.B. Colby? Did your library have Colby’s books, the ones that featured the same red and white cover design? With titles like Musket to M14: Pistols, Rifles and Machine Guns Through The Years? I recall that my grammar school library must have had twenty or so Colby titles. They were very popular in the fourth grade, along with books about Godzilla and other movie monsters.

One of my early class rooms also had a copy of Colby’s Strangely Enough floating about, and since I enjoyed that kind of spooky In Search Of stuff I read it a bunch of times.