The new self-hurt, I mean.... self-help book craze (This "mean but honest" approach seems to be more and more pervasive in our culture. Teen lovers everywhere, beware.) (AlterNet)
- Can I Sit With You? (Send your painful childhood memories to these editors and they will publish it on their blog and in a new book published through Lulu.)
- Spotlight on Sarah Dessen ("Welcome to Sarahland") (Publishers Weekly)
- More about product placement in YA (Articulate and fair, I think. Thanks Tadmack.) (Finding Neverland)
- Stories and reading are alive and well (In spite of what Steve Jobs said. I like this article. It made me feel good.) (New York Times, reg. required)
- 'Sorry boys, this is our domain' (YALSA responds to yesterday's New York Times article -- see Anastasia's post here -- and discusses how libraries can be involved.)
- Tween author alert (Nancy Yi Fan learned English at 7 and was a published author by 13. Amazing.) (Voice of America News)
- The Adventures of Jonh Blake (New interactive, comics project, DFC, will include this weekly comic strip by Philip Pullman) (press release)
Posted by alli
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Comments
Interesting about the self-help book craze. After the ongoing discussion about entitlement and the need for praise in Gen Y . . . why do young women and others want abusive self-help. You would thing feel good self help would score.
Posted by: zak | February 22, 2008 10:10 AM
I just wrote about "Can I Sit With You?" as part of our bullying series on Shaping Youth: http://www.shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=1150 and find it fascinating the authors were 'invited and disinvited then reinvited again' to be part of a middle school panel concerned about some of the 'mature' subject matter of real life stories being tackled in the user generated content...
To me this represents a much bigger "self help vs. self abuse" discomfort level w/media right now as educators and parents worldwide deal with the 'tmi' issue dancing on the fringe of what's appropo...
From book club picks to edgy sites/resources that mirror the reality of what's going on in the larger social spectrum, parents & youth advocates are often straddling the fence, wondering if shared pain/peer experiences help or ‘plant ideas’ when dealing with adolescent angst.
As far as the ‘self-hurt’ trend of in your face sarcasm/‘you’re an idiot/get over it’ types of books, I think much of that is our media culture’s ‘edgy’ normalization, as reflected in yesterday’s Ad Age post, “Snide Advertising Is Bad for Business and Society” ---We’ll be posting about that one soon too in terms of the impact on kids; as soon as I can get off this loaner computer and get my hard drive back! Sigh. http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=125053
Posted by: Shaping Youth | February 22, 2008 5:24 PM
Those reading stats in that NYTimes column should be taking other entertainment products into consideration.
Per the MPAA, in 2006 26% of survey respondents hadn't seen any movies in the past year, which means just like books 3 in 4 Americans did hit the theaters. The average movie goer saw 7.6 movies. So reading is about on par with movie attendance.
An Ipsos study, TEMPO: Keeping Pace with Digital Music Behavior, published last spring, which concluded that "the average number of CDs purchased in the past six months is just fewer than three (2.8)" To keep our math consistent, we're looking at around 5.6 CD purchases in the past year. People purchase more books than CDs on average. And more people are buying books than are buying CDs. "Half (51%) of US consumers aged 12 and older purchased a physical CD in the past six months," whereas we say that 75% of Americans bought a book in the past year.
Posted by: zak | February 24, 2008 6:59 PM