In keeping with my discussion posted yesterday about reading, and what aids us in our reading selections, Aidan Chambers, in Introducing Books to Children (2006) considers children, and their responses to books from infancy to adulthood. The first response of infants is generally to put the book (and whatever else is around) into their mouth, and their regard of “book as toy” remains until they are able to read and appreciate books for their storyline, rather than just a toy made of cheap, coarse papers, thick, durable covers, large exaggerated illustrations and huge text.
The focus of the Readers’ Advisory course which I am enrolled in is adult RA. I am a firm believer that in order to adequately serve the adult population, on must first understand child development, and how readers develop their basic conventions of reading.
Chambers also suggests that paperback publishers are aware of how strong an influence the look and feel of a book can have in attracting or repelling buyers. At times, there is a disconnection between the image on the cover and the text contained within.
A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to meet Barbara Haworth-Attard at a book club organized for a teen group at our library. It wasn’t until heard her book talk that I realized that authors submit the text, and the publishing company generally takes care of the cover and any other illustrations. Sometimes books are produced with varying covers, to be distributed in different areas or eras. Chambers says that good book-selling “seeks to raise the right expectations in the potential reader, expectations which will be satisfied by the text” (2006, 175). I believe that generally once people read the text, and become more familiar with the story, their attitudes towards “book-as-object” changes considerably.
Another interesting part of Readers’ Advisory which I feel is worth considering is the responses caused by the reader’s personal history. This is a tremendously difficult concept to consider when performing a 5-minute (maximum) reader’s advisory interview. It is virtually impossible to know, or even begin to understand how the history of a reader’s life will affect their book selections, or their interpretation of the recommended books. There are many aspects of patrons, which are not outwardly obvious – there would be no way of knowing, nor should we be assuming, that a patron, for example, struggles with alcohol abuse or was abused as a child, or even, more simply, that the person read and continues to be disturbed by such violent children’s stories as Little Red Riding Hood. In this sense, a reader’s history affects the books that they select, and affects the results of the readers’ advisory interview.
As discussed in class, as readers, the minute we open the books we read, our personal lives are inevitably attached. All books are made out of other books and, according to Chambers (2006) our reading is dependent on all we have read before – therefore, our “histories as readers” (Chambers, 177) influences how we read the books we read. Some books I have read seem to deliberately play on previous reading knowledge in order to make the story. As an obvious and extremely simple example, the content of Goodnight Moon (Wise Brown, Margaret) depicts the process of a child saying ‘goodnight’ to everything around, including “Goodnight cow jumping over the moon”. This inevitably plays off a Mother Goose rhyme which Wise Brown assumes that either the parent, or the child would know.
I believe it is important to understand children as readers before one begins to attempt adult RA. I’ll delve into this another day … (to be continued)
