YA Guy Reports: Why Girls Aren't Reading

My daughter used to love to read.

Voraciously. As a pre-teen she read just about anything you put in front of her, though she favored fantasy series: Harry Potter, Narnia, The Shadow Children, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner. When she entered her teen years, she started reading realistic fiction: Sarah Dessen, Gayle Forman, S. E. Hinton. She loved the classics--Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye--and some modern classics, including Life of Pi and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When she met YA writers Erin Bowman and Kat Zhang at a workshop for young writers, she was so jazzed she ran right out and gobbled down their books as well. As the daughter of a writer, it’s perhaps unsurprising that she read so much. But it was still impressive.

And then she started high school.

She doesn’t read anymore. Oh, she reads what’s assigned (currently The Odyssey for English, a book about leukodystrophy for Biology, and newspaper articles for Social Studies). But pleasure reading has shriveled to near nothing.

As I see it, there are two main reasons for this.

--First and most obviously, the amount of homework she has every night and weekend leaves virtually no room for leisure reading. She averages four hours of homework per weeknight, five per day over the weekend. Some weekend days, she does nothing but homework. And much of the homework is repetitive, boring drills: once you’ve proven twenty times that you can summarize a chapter, you really don’t need to summarize any more chapters. But the teachers don’t see it that way, and neither does the school district. And so reading for pleasure takes a back seat to working out three hundred identical algebraic formulas to prove yet again that you can work out algebraic formulas.

--Second and somewhat less obviously, high school--or at least my daughter’s high school--strips the fun out of reading, making it yet another onerous, meaningless chore. It’s bad enough that ninth graders are reading The Odyssey (a book I first read in college, and that my current college students struggle with)--but was it really necessary to use a stodgy, antiquated prose translation of Homer’s epic poem? With so much great literature for young people out there, both classic and modern, what on earth is the point of making young teens slog through a three thousand-year-old behemoth for which they can’t possibly have any associations or context?

We obsess endlessly about why boys aren’t reading. We don’t talk so much about why girls aren’t reading. (Indeed, when I Googled "why girls aren't reading," I got the same articles about why boys aren't reading.)

Based on my experience, I’d have to say girls aren't reading because high school beats the love of it clean out of them.