OK, imagine yourself as boy deciding whether to read a book or play a video game. Your parents got you Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! to read because, well, because it won the prestigious Newbury. Wasn’t that thoughtful of them!

Now, suppose your parents had instead picked up something a little less prestigious to read. Hmmm, perhaps one of the Capt. Underpants series would do. I’m sure the series has won all kinds of awards … I just don’t have time at the moment to seek them out. But a boy just might crack open one of these books.

The WPost today nicely lays out the dilemma:

    … the literary world is debating the Newbery’s value, asking whether the books that have won recently are so complicated and inaccessible to most children that they are effectively turning off kids to reading. Of the 25 winners and runners-up chosen from 2000 to 2005, four of the books deal with death, six with the absence of one or both parents and four with such mental challenges as autism. Most of the rest deal with tough social issues.

An article in October’s School Library Journal — “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” by children’s literary expert Anita Silvey — touched off the debate, now in full bloom on blogs and in e-mails. It is the new flashpoint in the struggle to draw children into the delicious world of books at a time when the National Endowment for the Arts says fewer Americans are choosing to read than they did 20 years ago, risking social and economic consequences.

…………

“I can’t help but believe that thousands, even millions, more children would grow up reading if the Newbery committee aimed to spotlight books that are deep and beautiful and irresistible to kids,” said Lucy Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a professor of children’s literature.

In an interview, Silvey said one example of inaccessibility is the 2008 winner, “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village” by Laura Amy Schlitz — a series of monologues that Deborah Johnson, manager of the extensive book section at Child’s Play in the District, agreed would be difficult for most kids to read on their own.

 …..

 ”If you force someone to read a book, the less likely you are to like it,” said Elias Feldman, 13, an eighth-grader at private Landon School in Bethesda. Teachers, he said, like to select books ripe for analysis rather than for a gripping narrative. He said he understands that motivation but thinks kids would read more if their assigned books engaged them.

John Beach, associate professor of literacy education at St. John’s University in New York, studied 30 years of book lists chosen by children and adults. He found that less than 5 percent overlap between the Children’s Choice Awards — named every year by the International Reading Association — and the library association’s annual Notable Children’s Books list, which includes many Newbery and Caldecott winners.

Books prized by children had stories and characters “accessible” to their lives, Beach’s report concluded. “The Newbery has probably done far more to turn kids off to reading than any other book award in children’s publishing,” he said.

Richard Allington, an education professor at the University of Tennessee and a literacy expert, wonders why adults seem to identify literature with books that are sad and difficult. So does Temuulen Uranbayar, 11, a fifth-grader at Long Branch Elementary School in Arlington.

He says he loves to read — but not always the books his teachers want him to. “I love funny chapter books, when I get to pick,” said Temuulen, who is part of a project in 12 Arlington schools that anecdotally bears out the contention that kids select different books than adults.

 All I’m saying is, give Capt. Underpants a chance.

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