Wednesday 26 July 2017

Musings on Harry Potter and YA for boys

It probably didn't escape your attention that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone turned twenty this year. It didn't escape mine.

The book did escape my attention at the time though. I would have been just eleven then, the perfect age for it. I'd have probably identified with him a lot more strongly then, although ironically I was in the opposite situation to Harry - home and family was my refuge from school. I was thinking those sort of thoughts back then too, for The Philosopher's Stone was released in the summer, when I was preparing to go to secondary school.

I spent most of that summer on the Isle of Wight, making up my own stories as I ran up and down the garden or by the creek for want of enough reading material. We'd visit Freshwater Library regularly to try and obtain more but it was a small library without much in the way of the fiction that appealed to me - sports and fantasy. I don't recall ever noticing Harry Potter though.

I'm not really sure when I did first realise Harry Potter was a thing. I think it was around the time of the first movie by which time I'd have been fifteen. Some would argue that fifteen is a good age to get into Harry Potter but that really wasn't the case for me. My school library was stocked pretty much exclusively with fiction for ' grown ups' - Pratchett, Eddings, Feist, Jordan, Rankin, Brooks and so on. Going to an all boys selective education school meant certain assumptions were made about us and they were mostly correct. We wanted to read clever books and that meant books officially aimed at people a lot older than us. By the age of fifteen, the only YA books I was reading were Brian Jacques' Redwall books.

Honestly, if someone had given me Harry Potter at that age, I'd have been very snobbish about them. That's kids stuff. The whole idea of young adult would have struck me as complete idiocy back then although, once I'd have calmed down, I'd have seen a use for it. The same use that yellow and black together serves in nature. Not that I knew about the concept back then. It wasn't until I was seventeen or so that I finally noticed the existence of the label, back in Freshwater library. I'd read everything else in the place and noticed a new shelf. It had some of the Terry Pratchett books on it, although mostly the ones I'd avoided due to them being for kids. I read the Tamora Pierce Song of the Lioness quartet that summer. I liked it.

I forget when I finally got around to reading Harry Potter, although mid to late twenties sounds right. I think my sister might have prompted me. I loved them. I've read most of them at least twice. I've been to most of the major Potter tourist attractions in the world and while that was more at my good lady wife's urgings, I was a willing and enthusiastic participant. And as she will be the first to say, I hate fun. I love Harry Potter though and I think I'd have loved him even as a teenager. Gods knows how much I'd have loved him when me and him were the same age.

Where am I going with this? I hear fairly frequently that teenage boys don't read, that YA is aimed squarely at girls because that's what sells. I've also heard that JK Rowling styled herself that way in an attempt to fool said teenage boys into thinking they weren't reading a book by one of those cursed cootie carriers, with boys being far less likely to read books by and concerning women than they would a book by a man concerning men. Well it didn't work on me, although not for those reasons. My loss.

I've no idea how typical or atypical my childhood and that of my friends was. But if you want to talk about why teenage boys don't read, then yes, maybe my data is of some relevance. If there's one thing I think I can pinpoint with fair accuracy over most of the boys I know, both then and now, its the desire to appear grown up. That's the one place where I'm sure I was fairly typical. It's part ego, part perception that a lot of life's pleasures are restricted to the older. And it's pretty difficult to look grown up when you're reading a book everyone knows is for kids.

How do you tackle that? I don't know. Part of me even wonders if its worthwhile to try. It's not like there's any shortage of adult fiction that can fit to the tastes and limits of a teenage boy while also fitting the constraints of what a parent is willing to let them near. But that only works for those that want to read. Can there be a form of fiction out there that is well suited enough to the tastes and needs of teenage boys that it can break down the societal walls and convert the unconverted?

Again, I don't know. JK Rowling probably managed it, regardless of my own experiences, but she was a lightning strike. A cultural phenomenon telling everyone that the uncool was cool. That seems to me really what you need - and not just one Rowling but a number of them. But that will only happen when people write the right books.

Until they do though, I imagine there'll be a lot of teenage boys happy not reading, a handful of boys mostly reading books for grown-ups, and a YA genre with a mostly female fan base. Just as it is today. It's not the worst thing in the world. But if you wanted to grow the market for books, its something you'd target.

So far though, it seems the publishers are just as ignorant as I am on how to do it. Good luck to them - they'll need it getting through to the kid I was.

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