Commentary published in the April 2003 issue of READING TODAY
The Series Books Phenomenon: The Case of “How
Do Beginning Readers Graduate to Real Books?”
by Richard M. Oldrieve
Are you an avid reader? Do you read in the airport, doctor’s office, and while riding the exercycle at the gym, the rec. center, or your living room? Do you read the back of cereal boxes if the morning paper gets lost in the snow?
Of course you’re an avid reader. That’s why you went into literacy education, why you’re a member of IRA, and why you’re reading Reading Today. As James Cunningham has said, reading can become so second nature that it becomes impossible to not read billboards and panel trucks.
Then and Now: Series Stories Sell
If you are a Baby Boomer or from the Greatest Generation then you might have gotten addicted to reading through a number of adventure series started by Edward Stratemeyer, including the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift. If you are a Gen Xer like my stepdaughters, then you might have read Ann M. Martin’s Baby Sitter’s Club series or R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps monster stories.
For decades, L. Frank Baum’s Oz series and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series have been drawing readers into the lair. And in a few short weeks fans of Harry Potter will be lining up at book stores to purchase the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s series.
Much like early TV and film cartoonists found it easier to keep the background simple so that they could concentrate on animating the characters and objects in the foreground, beginning readers find it helpful to read a series with predictable characters, settings, and plots. This allows them to hone the complex virtual reality skills necessary to transform the words on the page into a mind filled with images, smells, tastes, and sounds. In addition, most serial books help children feel empowered when adolescent heroes consistently outwit adults and other monsters.
With his Matthew Effect hypothesis, Keith Stanovich suggests that the more a beginning reader reads, the easier reading becomes, and thus the more the reader wants to read. Furthermore, there is a high correlation between how many books a student reads outside of class and how well the student does on standardized tests. In fact, one study found that as little as one hour of outside reading a week helped students score high.
To her credit, First Lady Laura Bush, a former librarian and fourth-grade teacher, is focusing many of her bully pulpit speeches and events on reducing aliteracy as opposed to illiteracy—an effort that harks back to Mark Twain’s famous line, “The man [sic] who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
Seeking Diversity
But did you ever stop to consider that while we often poke fun at the early basal books, even “modern” serial books continue to exude a Dick and Jane white bread aura that fails to interest large swathes of 9- to 12-year-olds? (Try clicking: “books” / “children's books” / “9-12 year old” / “series” on Amazon.com to see if you can find a series focused on minority characters and cultures.) And did you ever stop to consider that maybe the lack of culturally diverse book series might be a large reason why many minority children seem to be doing fine on standardized tests right up until the fourth grade and then they fall off the charts?
Undoubtedly, there are some series by more recent authors and updated versions of older ones that contain side characters and an occasional hero who happens to be African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Middle Eastern American, and/or Native American—most notably the American Girl series. In general, however, the theme, tone, language, culture, and recurring heroes are not, for example, as identifiably Asian American as any literary work by Amy Tan, or as African-American as any novel by Toni Morrison.
To ensure that this vital niche is filled, I suggest that the International Reading Association take four steps.
√ Create awards for book series that target a culturally diverse population.
√ Hound book publishers into developing series targeting minorities (and hopefully European Americans, too).
√ Request that Amazon.com, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and other book sellers create the space and categories to sell the small number of minority-focused series that already exist.
√ Get the word out to teachers and librarians to purchase the old and new series, include them on their shelves, and recommend that their students read them.
The book companies might claim that creating these series wouldn’t be worth the expense. But it was during the Great Depression that Edward Stratemeyer conceived many of his adventure series and was hiring hacks to churn them out.
Similarly, before V.C. Andrews died in 1986, she created a backlist of 63 plot summaries, and ever since Andrew Neiderman has been mining them to write gothic novels that are as popular with adolescents as the originals. Where there is a will and a well thought out framework, targeted series can be written quickly by teams of unknown but talented writers.
Furthermore, the American Library Association has recruited a broad spectrum of celebrities to pose for posters that are hung in school libraries everywhere. Each poster is emblazoned with “READ” and features a celebrity posed amidst artifacts for which he or she is famous while reading his or her favorite book.
Thus, it would seem that the right messengers are already publicizing the overarching right cause. All that is needed is for ALA and/or the International Reading Association to team up with a couple of well-chosen celebrities who promote reading, such as Laura Bush or Oprah Winfrey. Then it wouldn’t be long before targeted serial books would be capturing the reading interest of our increasingly diverse young adolescent population.
Richard M. Oldrieve is a doctoral candidate in literacy education at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, USA.