The young people who participated in our survey were between
12 and 15 years old, that is, they are the daughters and sons of the new
century, of the milennium. The production of books for children and young
adults has grown alongside them and, together with the educational programmes
related to reading promotion during these years, this means that this generation
of Mexicans has had the most books within their reach. It is ironic that it is
also the generation that has had the most access to electronic activities which
probably distract them from reading (although we are only just glimpsing what
these activities could really mean for their literacy practices), however, it
seems this does not mean that they have stopped reading.
In this blog post we will comment
on the list of titles obtained from the survey and also on the differences and
similarities between 1992 and 2014 in terms of what the market offers and
reading preferences. Athough some of the 2014 survey’s questions were changed
due to practical reasons, we believe that the list allows us to make some
tentative observations about the changes in the last 25 years, changes that
take us from a time in which Harry Potter was totally unknown (perhaps even to
his creator) to a time in which he is a character familiar to millions of
readers around the world; therefore, an alternative title for this blog could
well be “Reading in Mexico pre- and post- Harry Potter”.
In the survey we applied in September 2014 to 209 second and third year secondary students, we asked them
to write down the names of the books that they remembered reading when they
were “very little”; “in primary school” and “in the last two months”. The
result was a total list of about 350
different titles. They mentioned stories as well as books and we don’t know
how many they actually finished reading but despite this and some questionable
responses (Fifty Shades of Grey when
they were “very young”?), the list of titles is revealing in many ways.
The great variety of these titles is what is immediately
apparent; although some titles are repeated, these are fewer than those which
appear only once. The most frequently repeated titles were “The Three Little
Pigs and the Wolf” (70); “Little Red Riding Hood” (57) and The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry (44). The rest belong to various literary genres:
fables, fairy tales, traditional stories (myths and legends), non-fiction,
picturebooks, graphic novels, comics, classic and contemporary children’s and
young adult literature and books “for adults”, both classic and contemporary.
If we concentrate only on the list of 130 titles that the adolescents said they had read in the two
months before the survey (that is, during the summer of 2014), we can see
that they continue to read this variety of genres, in particular, non-fiction
(especially historical), “self-help”, comic strips, traditional stories and
legends. However, the books that predominate are those that we could classify
as “children’s literature” or “YA literature”, together with literary
“classics” and “best-sellers” for adults. Among the classics there are clearly
books that were required as school reading but there are also signs of a
growing interest in novels and poetry.
In the questionnaire from 1992 (92 students), if we set aside the required school reading,
there was also a prevalence of non-fiction and self-help books but the titles
that stood out were novels of “social-realism” (sex, drugs, abuse, relationships)
with young protagonists, for example, Born
Innocent, Go Ask Alice and Sara T – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.
A few other
books were based on human development or “spiritual” themes, such as Jonathan
Livingston Seagull. (It is worth noting that this questionnaire was
carried out a few years before the appearance of the extraordinarily successful
books by Carlos
Cuauhtémoc Sánchez, which provide conservative self-help messages within overly
dramatic narratives involving young people; these were the most read titles in
a similar survey carried out with a similar age group a few years later in
1996). The only two books that could be classified as “children’s literature”
were Little Women and Tom Sawyer.
Fast-forward to 2014 and the most popular
books are: The Fault in our Stars (29), Around the World in Eighty
Days (12), The Hunger Games (11), Harry Potter (volume not
always specified) (7), Fifty Shades of Grey (6), Twilight (6), The
Boy in the Striped Pijamas (5), Catching Fire (5), Ghostgirl
(5) and Three Metres above the Sky (5).
Several trends are immediately apparent: first, the number of readers
for John Green’s novel; second, that among these first ten titles, six are
marketed specifically for “young adults” (while The Boy with the Stripped
Pyjamas can be considered a “cross-over” book). Eight of these books had
also been made into films (Fifty Shades had not yet been released).
Among the rest of the titles there are many other books that are marketed as
“children’s or YA literature”, including Divergent, Diary of a Wimpy
Kid, Momo, and Percy
Jackson among others. While most are translations, a few books by Mexican
authors appear, such as La panza del Tepozteco [The Belly of the
Tepozteco] by José Agustín and Siete
cadáveres decapitados [Seven decapitated cadavers] by Antonio Malpica.
Finally, graphic novels make an appearance, which they did not do in the list
from 1992.
A
few books seem to have survived the transition into the new century (perhaps it
is because they were reccommended to the readers by their parents’ generation?).
Among the books that were mentioned in
1992 and appear again in 2014, are The Diary of Anne Frank, Go
ask Alice, Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, Jonathan
Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince. There
are also several books by Cuauhtémoc Sanchez (Un grito desesperado, Juventud
en éxtasis and Los ojos de mi princesa).
From
this initial view of the survey results, we can conclude that young people ARE reading, and that ‘post-
Harry Potter”, they read more books and within a greater variety of genres. The
results also suggest that the reading of children’s and YA literature has
greatly increased, and that, in spite of or perhaps because of film, interent
and social media, young people continue both to find pleasure and to look for answers
in books.
