Researcher Suggests Ratings System for YA Books

By Maryann Yin

Should there be a ratings system for young adult books?

Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne studied the 40 YA books that topped the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2008, identifying 1,500 “profane words” in the books.

She explained her thoughts at U.S. News: “I think we put books on a pedestal compared to other forms of media … I thought long and hard about whether to do the study in the first place—I think banning books is a terrible idea, but a content warning on the back I think would empower parents.”

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Rich, beautiful and popular: Foul-mouthed characters in teen books have it all

  Bestselling authors of teen literature portray their more foul-mouthed characters as    rich, attractive and popular, a new study finds.

Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne analyzed the use of profanity in 40 books on an adolescent bestsellers list. On average, teen novels contain 38 instances of profanity between the covers. That translates to almost seven instances of profanity per hour spent reading.

Coyne was intrigued not just by how much swearing happens in teen lit, but who was swearing: Those with higher social status, better looks and more money.

“From a social learning standpoint, this is really important because adolescents are more likely to imitate media characters portrayed in positive, desirable ways,” Coyne said.

Coyne’s study were published May 18 in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

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Unseen Le Petit Prince pages land for auction

New interpretation … first published in 1943, and written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince has sold more than 80m copies

Experts have discovered two unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince which cast new light on the children’s classic and will be auctioned in May.

By Alison Flood

Rare unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, which shed new light on the beloved story, have been discovered and are set to be auctioned later this month.

The pages were part of a collection of Saint-Exupéry’s writing passed to French auction house Artcurial by a private collector earlier this year. Reading through the material, experts were astonished to discover that it included two unpublished pages from The Little Prince, one of which features entirely original material and could give a political perspective to the story of the prince from a tiny planet who journeys through the universe before arriving on Earth.

“His writing is terrible, but we managed to interpret it and realised that two of the pages, among all these pages, were unpublished material from The Little Prince,” said Benoît Puttemans from Artcurial’s books department. “It was a big shock.” The Little Prince has sold millions of copies around the world. Saint-Exupéry died in action in 1944, the year after it was published.

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Winnie-the-Pooh: From Acton to Hundred Acre Wood

Rare Winnie the Pooh memorabilia Photo: Rii Schroer

On the unveiling of a new plaque to mark Winnie-the-Pooh’s birthplace, Anoosh Chakelian examines the unlikely story of the bear’s origins.

A rags-to-riches story worthy of Alan Sugar was revealed earlier this month at the unveiling of a plaque to mark the place of Winnie-the-Pooh’s creation in a building tucked away in Acton, West London.

The Farnell factory, which manufactured Britain’s first teddy bears, was Pooh’s unlikely birthplace. Since the factory has since been demolished the plaque has been placed on The Elms, a Georgian house owned by the Farnell family.

The bear was one of a batch produced in 1921 and sent from silk merchant John Kirby Farnell’s factory to Harrods, where Daphne Milne, Christopher Robin’s mother, bought him for her son’s first birthday present.

Pooh spent the rest of his days flitting between the Milnes’ London home and Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, an area in East Sussex that inspired AA Milne’s Enchanted Place, Hundred Acre Wood, the House at Pooh Corner, and Pooh’s other favourite haunts.

 Shirley Harrison,who last year wrote a biography of the original toy, The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh, and has lived in Hartfield, has been campaigning for a plaque to be placed somewhere in Pooh’s suburban homeland for years.

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American High School Students Are Reading Books At 5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels: Report

High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels far below those appropriate for teens, according to a recent report.

A compilation of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school shows that the average reading level of that list is 5.3 — barely above the fifth grade.

“A fifth-grade reading level is obviously not high enough for college-level reading. Nor is it high enough for high school-level reading, either, or for informed citizenship,” writes Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.

The results come from “What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools,” a report by Renaissance Learning, Inc. The data covers book-reading records for the 2010-2011 academic year among 2.6 million students in grades 1-12 from 24,465 schools in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

At the top of the list for high schoolers: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, followed by John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. See the slideshow below for the top 20 books among high schoolers.

To determine a book’s level of complexity, Renaissance uses an ATOS readability formula that takes into account several predictors: average sentence length, average word length, word difficulty level and total number of words in a book or passage. While readability formulas can’t say much for the depth of literary aspects within a text, they offer objective measures of vocabulary and sentence complexity.

Author Dan Gutman writes in the report’s foreword that kids should be reading “whatever they want,” but Stotsky says high school students should be reading “books above a sixth-grade reading level, for sure.”

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Wimpy Kid tops ‘Blue Peter’ poll

Jeff Kinney

By Katie Allen

A wimpy kid has beaten a boy wizard, teenage spy and young soldier to the title of Best Children’s Book of the Last 10 Years.

Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Puffin) has topped a “Blue Peter” poll after viewers were asked to vote online for their favourite of the 10 bestselling children’s books of the last decade. His novel beat nine other shortlisted titles including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Charlie Higson’s Young Bond: SilverFin and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.

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‘Charlotte’s Web’ and 99 more ‘great’ kids books

By Bob Minzesheimer

Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White’s 60-year-old novel about how a determined farm girl and a noble, vocabulary-building spider save a naïve runt of a pig, is No. 1 on a new list of the “100 Greatest Books for Kids.”

The rankings, released today by Scholastic Parent & Child magazine, are aimed at “generating controversy and conversation,” says Nick Friedman, the magazine’s editor in chief.

In that spirit, why is J.K. Rowling’s groundbreaking debut, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, only No. 6, chosen to represent the entire series?

 

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James Joyce children’s book sparks feud

The book has been illustrated by Casey Sorrow

A children’s story by James Joyce has been published for the first time by a small press in Dublin.

However the Zurich James Joyce Foundation has called its publication an “outrage”, saying it had not granted permission for the book’s release.

The Cats of Copenhagen was written in a letter to Joyce’s grandson in 1936 as a “younger twin sister” to the already published story, The Cat and the Devil.

The story tells of a Copenhagen in which things are not what they seem.

Publisher Ithys Press says Joyce’s works are now in the public domain.

The letter, in which the tale was found, was donated to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation by Hans Jahnke, the stepbrother to Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce.

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‘Blue Peter’ vote for top kids’ book of decade

By  Katie Allen

Children’s TV show “Blue Peter” is to search for the best children’s book of the last decade, with children able to vote online from a shortlist of 10.

Authors including J K Rowling, Michael Morpurgo and John Grisham are in the running, with the winner to be announced on the show on 1st March,  alongside the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award on a special show tying into World Book Day.

The list is made up of the bestselling fiction books (by volume) for eight to 11-year-olds published between January 2002 and December 2011 with the data supplied by Nielsen BookScan.

Tim Levell, editor of “Blue Peter” and chair of judges, said: “Children care as much about books as adults do─if not more so. We wanted to capture that by creating a vote to find out which book from the last 10 years they love the most.

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More National Groups Demand Release of Detained Books, As Teachers Adopt Banned Mexican American Studies

By Jeff Biggers

From the high plains of Wyoming to the urban centers of Atlanta, Chicago and New York City, hundreds of schools launched a historic teach-in movement today to incorporate lesson plans from the banished Mexican American Studies program in Tucson in their own classrooms.

Organized by the Teacher Activist Groups and joined by Rethinking Schools and other educational networks, the month-long “No History is Illegal” initiative comes on the heels of an unusually strong statement by over two dozen of the nation’s largest publishing, literary and education organizations that calls on the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and Arizona state education officials to recognize First Amendment rights and “return all books to classrooms and remove all restrictions on ideas that can be addressed in class.”

Thousands of detained books remain behind lock and key in the school district’s warehouse like broken chairs and desks and school bus parts, despite the fact that the TUSD library catalog shows that there are less than 2-3 copies of several of the removed Mexican American Studies textbooks in the entire school district, which serves more than 55,000 students.

In outrage at the detained books, nearly 15,000 people have also signed a petition started by former Mexican American Studies teacher Norma Gonzalez, which calls on the Tucson school district to “immediately remove these books from their ‘district storage facility’ and make them available in each school’s library. Knowledge cannot be boxed off and carried away from students who want to learn!”

Signed by representatives of the Association of American Publishers, American Association of University Professors, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council for the Social Studies, National Council of Teachers of English, and the PEN American Center, among other national groups, the censorship statement yesterday also calls out the troubling doublespeak by Tucson Unified School District administrators like Superintendent John Pedicone, who declared the drastic confiscation of textbooks and curriculum materials in front of children and subsequent detainment in locked storage units is not a ban.

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