#concerntrolling

then it's a damn good one 

And here we thought we'd seen it all: essay after essay about the horror of adults reading YA, the alleged death of adulthood/death of patriarchy & the YA lit-ification of America, why we need to put down Harry Potter for Henry James because we're grown-ups, for chrissakes, etc. etc. etc., ad infinitum.  Now Rebecca Mead at the New Yorker has written an essay, "The Percy Jackson Problem", so absurd in its concern trolling that you might think it was a joke. 

 What if the strenuous accessibility of “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” proves so alluring to young readers that it seduces them. . . away from an engagement with more immediately difficult incarnations of the classics, Greek and otherwise? What if instead of urging them on to more challenging adventures on other, potentially perilous literary shores, it makes young readers hungry only for more of the palatable same?

  Perilous literary shores?  I...what? 

As in other essays like this, no evidence is provided as proof that Percy Jackson=meth that will eat holes in the brains of children.  What is offered instead is yet another concern-trolling essay whining about how commercial fiction is some kind of drug that never leads to reading anything worthwhile and the author, Tim Parks, knows this because Auden once said he was addicted to detective fiction — ADDICTED, PEOPLE — and also because Parks' own kids don't like the books he does.  Parks ends his essay with this line also quoted by Mead: "I seriously doubt if E.L. James is the first step toward Shakespeare. Better to start with Romeo and Juliet."

Never mind that both Parks and Mead conveniently forget that Shakespeare was the popular entertainer of his day. (What would a concern-trolling article written in 1600 look like? "THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM: WHAT IF SHAKESPEARE LEADS TO MORE SHAKESPEARE?") My problem with these essay is the insistence that there is no evidence that backs up the premise that reading popular books can be a gateway to reading other books, maybe even "important" ones:

From the blog of Kurtis Scaletta:

"What if, I would answer, what if… what if there was a body of research that already answered this question? What if there was an entire professional enterprise devoted to it? What if there was some (new) fangled-thing called “reading education” that explored the lifelong relationships between kids and books?

Hey, guess what! There totally is!

For example, see the work of Jim Trelease, who coined the term “home run book,” an idea summed up nicely by Stephen Krashen:

One very positive experience can create a reader.

What’s a very positive experience? It’s a kid getting excited by a book. Sometimes, as Michael Smith and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm discovered, the book has an authenticity in a reader’s life (which is why we need diverse books). Sometimes, as William Brozo has explored, the book has something do with the adult a kid wants to become. Sometimes, according to Krashen, that book is an award-winning literary historical novel, sometimes it’s gritty urban adventure, sometimes it’s a formulaic mystery (like the ones Mead admits to liking as a child), and sometimes it’s a comic book (gasp). For millions of kids, apparently, it is Percy Jackson.

...This isn’t a theory at this point, it has been affirmed by decades of research. To ask “What if a positive reading experience totally ruins reading?” is as ridiculous at this point as asking if vaccines cause autism: not because the question itself has never been worth asking, but because it’s been answered exhaustively and to keep asking it shows a dogged incuriosity in the facts."

But let's say none of this research existed, or that it didn't answer the question "Does reading TWILIGHT really lead to reading PRIDE & PREJUDICE and how much should we care?"  Worse than ignoring research into reading education is the fact that these essayists consistently ignore their own experience as readers. Oh, maybe Rebecca Mead became a reader of "literary" fiction because of the stories of Enid Blyton, but that doesn't mean that will happen for everyone because...why?  What's so special about Rebecca Mead, or rather, what's NOT so special about the 20 million kids she's allegedly worried about?