It's an article of faith in my business (I'm a librarian in youth services, for anyone reading who hasn't stumbled across me before) that getting girls to read is like getting fish to swim. As a group, girls will read anything. Each girl will have individual preferences, but there is no such thing as a book that no girl will read.

Getting boys to read is like getting cats to swim. Some like the water, and they all will attempt the activity rather than drown, but you almost have to throw many of them in. While girls will read "boy books", boys will not read "girl books". If you doubt me, ask yourself the last time you saw a boy reading Little Women without it having been assigned. Think about biographies, a classic non-fiction area frequented by both genders. The likelihood of a girl reading about the life of a famous man is much higher than the likelihood of a boy reading about the life of a famous woman -- except, of course, in March, which is Women's History Month, when such biographies are assigned.

When I select for my library's collection, I have to spend a lot of time looking for fiction with masculine themes and main characters who are boys or men. Otherwise I know that the boys who come in to look for something to read -- often at the insistence of Mom or of their female teachers -- will leave empty-handed because the library "doesn't have any books". This has been exacerbated by the proactive girls' education movement, which has produced a great deal of interesting and award-winning fiction with girls as the main characters, supplementing the traditional "girl books" (romance and domestic stories). There hasn't been nearly as much in the development of high-quality fiction with boys as lead characters until relatively recently, in part as a response by the publishers of series like Scholastic's Dear America to librarians' complaints (reflecting parent and teacher complaints) that they were all girls, all the time. I expect the trend to attempt to provide good, modern literature for boys will continue now that the publishers are aware of the unserved market.

Boys will read non-fiction, which has enormous value as a transmitter of information. Non-fiction also enhances the physical skill of reading, which involves training the eye to scan a page and decipher the symbols in a fluid and meaningful way, so that the activity of reading moves beyond the painfully slow process of decoding individual words, and in some cases syllables. Without practice, that skill will either never develop or will atrophe from lack of use.

However, though non-fiction reading is very important, and some of it is very well-written, non-fiction will often lack literary value. It's often choppy and relies on illustrations to convey meaning. This use of pictures is entirely appropriate in most non-fiction, but does little to encourage the young to move from the iconographic to the textual representation of reality. Also, non-fiction by its very nature tends to shy away from storytelling, with its natural beginning-to-end sequencing, and from the use of figures of speech, which add the complexity of thought mentioned in the article that Matt, um, cited in its entirety.

The importance of getting boys to read fiction, and read it every day, cannot be underestimated when seeking to develop boys as effective writers. Writers gain their depth of expression and learn their voice by constant reading. Not only will those physical reading skills be developed, but skills of intellectual criticism will creep in as well, without any conscious effort.

Reading a series like the former phenomenon Goosebumps, or the perennial Hardy Boys, may seem like a waste of time to some parents and teachers, but it allows the reader, boy or girl, to have a decent hour's entertainment interacting with characters instead of having TV feed stories to him, lets him practice reading, and, most importantly, lets him outgrow a series by realizing that he knows how most of the stories will turn out before he reaches the middle of the book. A kid who moves up to more challenging stories because he has made the developmental move himself will be far more likely to finish the stories, to work at them when they become a little tough, and to express himself in a way that reflects his own greater ability to interpret written language.

Science fiction is something of a problem. Boys will read SF, especially "hard" SF, more readily than girls will, but there isn't a lot of modern juvenile-level SF to be had. The themes involved in "serious" modern SF are often knotty ethical problems that children lack the equipment to analyze until they get to 5th or 6th grade, and by then it becomes more difficult to interest the non-reader. I'm reluctant to suggest older hard juvenile SF because it dates itself so quickly, and the kids lose interest. A lot of what's called SF for kids is actually fantasy, and as such often features (again) strong female leads or intimations of "special friendships" with girls -- the cooties of death at the elementary level. Work like Jane Yolen's Commander Toad series appears infrequently.

Jon Scieszka, author of the Time Warp Trio series, The Stinky Cheese Man, Math Curse, and other comical books for kids, has begun an initiative aimed at literacy among boys called Guys Read, that also has connections with readerville.com. I notice that Guys Read hasn't been updated in a little while, but the conversation in the forums is still ongoing, if not particularly muscular. Maybe a little input from the Zone could push the participation/interest level into "daily" rather than "weekly" frequency. ;) After all, a lot of Guys who Read come here...

Anyway, it's a place to start.

Regards--
Mary Anne