tween/teen times
Summer (Facebook?) Reading

By Julie Pfitzinger

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I made a personal pledge to read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Despite the fact that my paperback version logged in at a daunting 850+ pages, I vowed to hang in until the bitter end.

It’s hard for me to recall just how long it took to read this classic, but after many previous summers spent carrying stacks of much shorter books home from the library to round out my summer reading, I knew I was up to the challenge. I do remember that when I turned that final page, it really felt like an accomplishment. (Pretty sure I got extra credit for a book report I handed in when school started again, too.)

I’m now the parent of a fifteen year old daughter and to say I’d be shocked to see her bring home a hefty copy of Anna Karenina tucked under her arm is something of an understatement. That is, unless Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame is going to be in a new movie version that I haven’t heard about, and even then, she’d probably just go online to find a blog with a book review and consider herself prepared.

In this age of Facebook, Twitter, blogging and texting, has summer reading for tweens and teens fallen out of favor

Jody Wurl, coordinator for Hennepin County Library’s “Teen Links” website, believes today’s teens definitely haven’t given up on recreational reading, but thinks they are just exploring it in different forms.

“The use of social media is about connecting with people who may share links to things that teens read for fun, which is actually reading for recreation, even if it’s not in a book,” she says. “I’d argue that they are doing recreational reading on Facebook.”

In her role, Wurl spends a lot of time talking to teens and she says they admit they don’t do much leisure reading during the school year because of assigned school work.

For tweens, it’s a different story. According to a section about reading statistics from the www.readfaster.com website, 56 percent of young people say they read more than 10 books per year, with middle school students reading the most. Approximately 70 percent of middle school students read in excess of 10 books per year, compared with only 49 percent of high school students.

“More younger teens read during the summer than older teens who are distracted with summer jobs and active social lives,” says Wurl.

In addition to reading online, many teens are also writing online as blogs created by and for teenagers have become extremely popular. However, Wurl says that teens typically tend to read blogs “within their own personal network” as a way to share news about their personal lives or continue to build relationships, but not necessarily to find great writing.

“I believe teens have different expectations when reading online versus a print format,” she says. “I think they would put down a book that didn’t have a good story or was poorly edited but probably tend to cut an online writer more slack.”

The fact remains that many teens are always on the hunt for a good story and it is Edward Cullen, a.k.a. Robert Pattinson, and his fellow Twilight characters who are still dominating the teen reading and request lists.

“The Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer continues to be hot, hot, hot, driven in large part by the movies,” says Susan Brown, senior librarian at the Hennepin County Library, whose job it is to select teen print and audio books for HCL.

Earlier this summer, Brown says there were over 260 people on the waiting list for a Twilight series book.
Other vampire tales, specifically the House of Night series by Kristin and P.C. Cast and the Vampire Academy series by Rochelle Mead, are “wildly popular,” adds Brown.

Another big hit with teens right now is graphic novels which include a visual component with the text. These include Superhero (Fantastic Four, Superman) graphic novels, manga titles originally published in Japan, and perhaps not surprisingly, graphic novels of popular fiction titles like… Twilight.

Back to technology for a moment. In spite of a huge marketing push and ubiquitous demonstration stands that have popped up at “big box” bookstores, Kindles, or eReaders, do not seem to be making a dent in the teen market, according to Wurl.

“My gut reaction is that teens are not using the hardware Kindles yet,” she says. “They wouldn’t spend the money on a device that only does one thing, although the apps might change that since you would be able to access your Kindle library from a phone or computer once you’ve built it up using the hardware device.”

It’s easy to be nostalgic about good old-fashioned summer reading – a big thick book from the library and a glass of lemonade in the backyard. However, this doesn’t mean that today’s teens might not be enjoying catching up with their favorite blog or re-reading a beloved Twilight tale – while sipping an iced latte at a local coffee shop – just as much.

For more information, visit www.teenlinks.org.
the website for teenagers sponsored by the Hennepin County Library.

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