Teen readers aren't in crisis, they're just making their own rules

The New Yorker’s David Denby wrote about teen readers losing their ‘reading obsession’, but his argument lacked insight into what motivates this generation.

I read David Denby’s stuffy New Yorker lament Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore? on my phone yesterday, glued to a screen just like the typical American teenagers he throws shade at in his opening paragraph. “Looking at them, you can envy their happiness,” Denby writes. “You can also find yourself wishing them immersed in a different kind of happiness – in a superb book or a series of books, in the reading obsession itself! You should probably keep on wishing.”

What follows is a wordy, predictable groaner: the kids these days, Denby writes, are unable to connect to each other outside digital technologies and uninterested in reading the classics. Oh, teens do read, he acknowledges, with a half-hearted nod to science fiction and fantasy favorites, graphic novels, and young adult literature. But they don’t read in a serious way – they ignore Dickens, Twain and Salinger. Denby lists a half-dozen other omissions too, only two of them women, it might be observed, and none of them people of color.

Continue reading...