Despite finding her first introduction to reading with “Janet and John” lacklustre, Victoria Hislop, our featured author in ‘Writers on Reading’, has a deep passion for reading. Like so many of her generation, her addiction to reading was firmly established reading “lashings” of Enid Blyton.
Compared to the breadth and number of books published for children and young adults today, children growing up in the 50’s,60’s and 70’s had such a narrow share of the book publishing market. Many of the books they read were written around the turn of the last century and often for Edwardian children. The idea of writing specifically for young adults did not exist and the avid teenage reader often went from reading The Secret Seven or The Five Find Outers to books written for adults by authors like Agatha Christie and the literary classics.
Talking of literary classics our recent poll ‘Have you ever pretended to have read a literary classic when you haven’t’ revealed 72% of you admitted you had! With so many literary classics made into films and serialised on TV perhaps people feel they don’t ‘need’ to read them, or maybe they are put off by memories of studying literature school. Meanwhile in the latest post from The Muser it seems the concept of the literary novel may be under threat, so will future generations be denied a literary heritage?
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It's strange that you talk about the lack of choice for children as I sometimes think the same thing, when i was younger we were limited to a much smaller range- an awful lot of them american in origin, or edwardian as you say, and it surprises me that they say children's reading is down despite there being so much more for them to read!
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