Should we let kids read bad books? Quick blog post today, readers, about the quality of kids reading materials. Lots of parents just want their kids to read. I’m lucky that my kids are hearty readers and devour most books without any fuss. In fact, taking away reading time is one of their dreaded consequences.
But what if the book your kid is reading is really bad?
Not full of bad words, but just written poorly? Bad books are all around us, but many of us don’t even know it.
Bad Soup
Here’s the bad soup analogy. I’m sure someone mentioned this to me, but I can’t remember who.
“You know when you make soup and you throw all the ingredients and cook it for 15 minutes and you can still taste everything separately that it’s not good soup. It’s bad soup.”
The Unwanted series is bad soup. If you read the cover, you think you’re getting this great combo of Harry Potter and Hunger Games. It’s got magic and science and death and teenage angst. But it’s also got head-hopping point-of-view problems, tons of showing, not telling, and in the first book, I don’t think the main character solves his own problem. I couldn’t read the other books in the series. The real unwanted is the kind of writing in these books. But my kids loved them.
Luckily, they are also reading Reina Telgmeier’s books and Judy Blume’s books and John Lewis’s books.
So does it matter if my kids are reading books that suck? Isn’t it more important that they are reading? I think it is, and I never once told them I thought the book was bad or poorly written. I let them read it and enjoy it and love it and when they are older and drag it out to read to their kids, they will figure it out for themselves.
Here’s a scary thought. What if I’m writing a bad book and I don’t even know it? Yikes.
And here’s another scary thought: they are making a movie.