Finding nonfiction right now is truly a challenge, because in B&N there is almost no nonfiction, and what’s there is either sort of Eyewitness, very kind of lavish color books, or a few very standard and crammed women’s history, African-American history in February, you know, some topics, holidays around the world, whatever. Biography series.
And the problem in libraries is while libraries do, in fact, buy award-winning books, good books, the shelves are so overstuffed, and so overstuffed very often with books that have been bought for curricular reasons, it’s hard to find. And I think a parent has to do a few things, or a teacher. One, talk to the librarian. Talk to someone who knows. Two, start to pay attention as you and a child you’re with makes their way through a stack, what kind of works for this child or this subject.
One thing I’ve often thought is kind of interesting: Young readers do author studies. It’s a very common thing that’s done from 6th grade on. They almost never do author studies on nonfiction authors. The assumption is almost as if, again, the topic defines the book, not the writer. Why? Writers have styles. Nonfiction writers choose to write… Kathleen Krull writes witty books. Her books are different for someone else who would do 50 inventors or painters or composers.
She has a style. And some authors, as I do, have more than one style. So I think that you should come to recognize, does your child like a Russell Freedman book? Does that work for your child? Well, there are a lot of Russell Freedman books. So you start, just as you would do with fiction. Does your child like Lois Lowry? Well, there’s other… The Giver isn’t the end of her writing.
And so I think you pay attention to what’s a kind of book. And think that something I’ve been talking about is, in fiction we have a very sophisticated sense of genre. There are many subgenres. In nonfiction we have three. Biography, memoir and everything else. And I think we have to start to develop, as librarians, as teachers and parents, what’s the subgenre my child likes? Does my child like historical mysteries?
Does my child like historical detective stories? Does my child like to read about scientists? Is my child fascinated with math? I think math is the area we publish, is the worst. We have math completely as a set of exercises, not as intellectual exploration. As far as I know, there’s one book, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Number Devil, originally written in German, is the only kid/adult book that makes math exciting as an intellectual journey.
So I think we need to start to… you need — you teacher, you parent — need to start to figure out which of these kinds of nonfiction is working for your child, and then talking to the librarian. I would also add, as kids get into teen age, there’s a whole other subset of nonfiction they need which is the same as a how-to.
How to get a summer job, how to do well on the SATs. We already have the sort of “your body’s changing,” diet kind of stuff, and also sexuality, etc. But I think recognizing that that’s part of the nonfiction world your kid may be drawn to, because they need advice, just as we adults need advice. So it is daunting. It is daunting, but I think that sort of exploratory mode, and I would say begin exploring in the library.
