| Michael and Katie Furness-Lane (sic in the SYP acknowledgement)
wanted to discover some hard empirical facts about children’s reading habits,
to set against the mere speculation which is all there was before; and,
on the basis of the facts, to make some recommendations about improving
matters. These are laudable objectives: as the authors say, ‘What children
read, why children read and all the subsidiary questions that these arouse,
should be issues of central concern to publishers, educationalists and practising
teachers alike.’ These are the questions they begin to answer in Books Girls
Read. The Furness-Lanes administered a questionnaire to the girls of ‘Eastedge’, a pseudonymous comprehensive school. They ana lysed the results in terms of a confident tripartite division of the girls into ‘Juvenile/Teenage’ (those content to be girlish), ‘Adult’ (those practising to be wives and mothers), and ‘Educational’ (the intellectuals). The statistical significance of findings from one school may be doubted. Indeed, the authors more than once acknowledged this, but only to brush it aside: ‘Though the figures are only marginally statistically significant, there do seem to be good arguments for suggesting that their actual significance as opposed to statistical significance is of some importance.’ We do not discover what these arguments are, but if we take them as read, then the report has many merits. First, the findings as to which type of girl reads what and why are plentiful, interesting, and not always expected. A reviewer must not give away the plot, but here is an unrepresentative sample: though no intellectuals read the Evening Standard, 14% of them read the Evening News (the report’s title is over-modest – it does not confine itself to books); most girls of all sorts profess not to care whether books are illustrated or not (because, the authors suggest, they like to see themselves as ‘big girls’); as girls get older, they graduate from Enid Blyton (most often read at 11–14, with Dickens in joint second place) to Ian Fleming, Grace Metalious and Nell Dunn (joint top reads at 14 and over). Out of these and other findings come some constructive and sensible recommendations. The crucial determinant of what gets read is what is available at the right place and at the right time: so bookselling outlets should be multiplied, diversified and enriched. Reading habits are ingrained by the age of 11: so new readers must be wooed and won before that age. Girls want to read about! real people with real problems – especially the problems they themselves confront: so there should be more realism, particularly sexual realism, in imaginative writing for children; and teachers and parents should be more liberal in their attitudes to what it is profitable and enjoyable for children to read. I count it a virtue too that the book is delightfully short – just 27 pages of text. Also, light relief is provided by prime samples of sociological jargon (often rubbing shoulders uncomfortably with chattiness and slang): girls who lie exhibit ‘respondent mendacity’; we meet ‘self-bought books’ (sack your sales directors!); sexual maturity is the ‘core ascribed criterion for passage into adult life’; being part of the ‘pop’ culture is an ‘age-specific completed role’; and ‘the school child is situationally in an unusually complex position’. But these are only moments of mud in a generally lucid, if sometimes poorly written, essay. Poorly copy-edited too: the SYP of all publishers should have done better than this. Still, here is another merit: the book can be recommended to all publishers who take subeditorial training seriously – it provides a perfect copy-editing exercise. It would be sad, though, to lose some of the errors: ‘behavoiurists’ nicely suggests the prurient side of social science; though the authors assure us that the present survey was conducted 'without the aid of a longitudinal study of individual girls’. A final point in the book’s favour is that it is only printed on one side of the paper: so when you have read it and extracted what you need, just remove three staples and you have a high-quality jotting pad. The publishers tell me that they have conducted a statistical survey on recent orders for the book: this reveals that 100% of buyers are female. I wonder if they also have it in common with the ‘respondents’ to the questionnaire that they read mainly in bed. Why not try a copy with your Bournvita tonight? Zzzzz … Robert Dugdale
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