World Book Day – the test teen reads Bookshelves

World Book Day – the test teen reads

by Genny Haslett, 24, English literature teacher at Bathampton Secondary School

It is often suggested that teachers and librarians aren’t pushing secondary school readers towards titles that challenge them enough, and so the organisers of World Book Day have announced a list which might provide some inspiration for anyone who’s stuck for ideas. This list of popular books for young adults, voted for by 10,000 people across the UK, features a top 10 to ‘shape and inspire’ teenagers, and handle some of the challenges of adolescence.

All but one of the books have already been made into films, demonstrating that when a book makes it to the big screen, it often then acquires more readers thanks to the film’s success. Of course, this isn’t always the case, as with George Orwell’s 1984, where the rather mediocre film does not compare so favourably with the book’s ability to conjure up a dark vision of life in a police state.

James Bowen’s A Streetcat Named Bod, published in 2012, is one of the few relatively contemporary books here. It’s also certainly for me the least predictable member of the list, but its extended stay on the bestseller list earned it – and its author – a devoted following. It is the touching story of Bob, the cat who helped a homeless man called James get his life back on track. Bob sits on James’s shoulder and sleeps at his feet while he plays the guitar on the street, and soon becomes the centre of attention. What makes the story particularly powerful is that it is based on author James Bowen’s real life.

Also on the list are J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. In this case it’s actually the whole series rather than one particular title that makes the shortlist. Perhaps the judges struggled to agree which one book to pick. For me, the books are rather more pre-teen than the rest of the books on the list, which are aimed at a more mature readership.

But Harry Potter is a special case: as Harry gets older in each successive book in the series, the stories do become more complex and darker. In a way, readers themselves grow up with Harry and his friends. Rowling asks some tough questions about standing up to authority, challenging ‘normal’ views and many other subjects close to teenage readers’ hearts. This should get rid of the idea that the whole series is just for young kids. In actual fact, half of all Harry Potter readers are over the age of 35, but that’s another story.

The list goes right back to the nineteenth century with Charlotte Bronte’s great romance Jane Eyre, showing that some books never grow old, though the majority are twentieth-century works such as Anne Frank’s heartbreaking wartime memoir The Diary of a Young Girl, which even now I find hard to get through without shedding tears. Personally, I would have swapped J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for one of the many classics that didn’t make the final selection, Lord of the Flies perhaps, William Golding’s nightmare vision of schoolboys stuck on an island.

Of course there’ll always be some choices we don’t agree with, but that’s what I think makes a list like this so fascinating. I’ve been using it with my class of 16-year-olds, and I got them to evaluate it and make other suggestions for what to include or how it could be changed. But what I hope can really make a lasting difference is if it stimulates them to try out writers on the list, perhaps ones they haven’t come across before, and be introduced to new styles of writing.