Judging a Book (Perhaps by its Cover): Vigilance in Showering your Children with Good Reading

Having taught English grammar and literature at Oakcrest for six years now, and as a professional who works with young people, I would like to share some of the trends I and my colleagues have been noticing over the years concerning teens and the books they read.

Vigilance in steering our young people toward good books is necessary. The cover of a book alone may not reveal its contents. A simple-looking flower could grace the cover of a book with quite disturbing material. A harmless-looking fantasy novel might contain alarmingly sexually explicit scenes written in graphic detail.

The fight against bad books is certainly not new. C.S. Lewis criticizes the damage what he calls the “green book” will do in his Abolition of Man, Dorian Gray suffers the loss of his soul through the “yellow book” of hedonism in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous novel, and Victor Frankenstein loses his humanity in pursuing the dark arts inspired by a dangerous book by Cornelius Agrippa in Mary Shelley’s famous story.

Teachers have noticed many superficial books our students gravitate towards when they make choices in reading for pleasure. With book challenges they find from various media outlets, teens tend to value the number of books they can read in a set amount of time, not necessarily the quality. Modern books that can be read quickly with very little thought have been written the same way: purely for gratification in the moment, with little to fill it besides plot alone. Often loaded with empty symbols, these types of books neglect any kind of moral development or Christian anthropology. 

It is no surprise that modernity has provided more books of this sort than not. Turning our children loose in a library or bookstore and asking a librarian or bookseller for advice no longer carries the same confidence in filling our children with wonder and a unified goal of moral development. Instead, our children may easily stumble upon any number of Dorian’s “yellow books,” which may unfortunately come with a great number of recommendations or praise from critics and booksellers. The lines between mature adult fiction and teen reads seem to have been blurred with increasingly inappropriate material being offered to young readers. We may find that authors we have relied on in the past have now changed direction, and we can no longer entrust our children to them.

We want books for our children that help in the aim of supporting parents and educators in reminding children that they are made in God’s image and are destined to be with Him forever, instilling wonder, revealing truth, and emphasizing the beautiful. This calls for vigilance in not only seeking “clean” books that avoid coarse language for the sake of it, or disturbing imagery and pornography, but also books that fill a young person’s moral imagination with admirable heroes and lessons learned. Sage advice, ethical candor, courage, faithfulness, kindness and compassion-filled books wrought with adventure or providing a window into a complex interior life fulfill readers in a way incomparable to a disposable, empty book devoid of meaning. A good book brings the joy of seeking truth to the reader which forms her good taste. 

It is difficult to keep up with the avalanche of modern teen and pre-teen literature; it is impractical for parents and teachers to try to read everything our daughters want to read before they can get to it. One approach is to intervene early. Inundate her with good stories while she is in the grammar stage. These stories are not meant to merely pass the time or provide passive escape, but are an important part of a daughter’s well-rounded education in virtue.

C.S. Lewis addresses the accusation that fairy tales are some form of escapism in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” He says the escapism to be wary of is in realism that is so close to school life that the child returns to the real world discontented. Lewis calls those types of stories “flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself as the object of admiration” while the fairy tale arouses the reader’s “longing for he knows not what (for our purposes I’ll change all of Lewis’s “hims” to “hers”). Lewis says [fairy tales] stir her with a “sense of something beyond her reach [. . .] and gives new dimension of depth. She does not despise the real woods because she has read of *enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.” The child reading the type of book Lewis calls escapism, desires success and is unhappy once the book is finished because she cannot have it: the child reading the fairy tale is happy for the very fact of desiring. Many modern teen novels fit this “flattery of the ego” category of which Lewis speaks. Think of the kind of novel in which an attractive teen girl’s main purpose is navigating a love triangle with perhaps some friends with flat characteristics that act as a foil to the main character, whom we are to admire merely because she is attractive. These novels are fun to read, but they are disposable, and do nothing to feed our daughters. 

Good books have the power to waken our minds to the beauty of the world, while a more trivial novel falsely makes us unhappy with the real world.

When our children are younger, they are more open to our opinions. If mom and dad say a book is good, they willingly read it with a joyful heart. Better still if they curl up with mom and dad and read good books as a family, bolstering a fondness for beauty and therefore order which provides a foundation to build upon throughout their lives. But it is when our girls reach the teen years, that they tend to close the door on our suggestions. They want the privacy to discover good books on their own. It is this privacy that we need to be wary of.

It is not practical to attempt to read every teen book your daughter intends to devour. Some books have so many volumes in a series, it is nearly impossible to keep up. But it is important to have conversations with your daughter about the books she chooses to read for pleasure. Ask her what captivates her, thrills her, moves her, takes hold of her. What is it about the books she chooses to read that enrich her through its quality, enchants her through its depth, vitality, and truthfulness; what convinces her through inherent logic and elevates her through the beauty of its poetic content? What are her thoughts on virtue? What is she discovering?  

Most of these questions I have adapted from one of my favorite books, Aesthetics, by Dietrich von Hildebrand. There are two volumes of this work. The first talks about beauty on all levels, including its objectivity, value, forms, and role in the senses. The second volume applies Von Hildebrand’s philosophy of beauty to the arts. In these books, Hildebrand defines beauty as the order in God’s creation. The good books are good because they reflect natural order and truth, while bad books are inherently disordered and contradict what it means to be human.

Here are some practical suggestions on bringing good books into your daughter’s life (in addition to sending her to Oakcrest School where all the books are good):

Read with her. You may already read a bedtime story as a family, or maybe you try to read together so many days a week. Reading aloud together is a beautiful way to bond and teach. When I introduce Anne of Green Gables to sixth graders, they often lack the stamina to start the book on their own. The language is beautiful, and brimming with nature imagery that sounds like a romantic poem instead of prose. Adults may recognize this beauty, but a child can grow weary during the most beautiful passages about grass and a lake. I always begin that book by reading it aloud for the girls. By the time we are introduced to our heroine, they are captivated. Meghan Cox Gurdon speaks of the importance of reading aloud in her book, The Enchanted Hour. She mentions an opportunity she had during her research to see a surviving volume of fairy tales of Charles Perrault [pur-oh], from 1695 (the book was a gift for the teenage niece of Louis the 14th). Meghan Cox Gurdon noticed in the margins for the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” were written directions near the dialogue of the wolf when he says “the better to eat you with.” The tiny handwriting says, (she translates the French) “These words should be said in a loud voice to make the child afraid that the wolf will eat him.” These stories were intended to be read aloud.

Many readers are attracted to book or reading challenges. I recommend you discourage your daughter from reading challenges that promote mere quantity as an accomplishment. One really good book that may take ages to read is worth more than a stack of novels that feel empty but are quick reads. Challenge your daughter instead to read for pleasure every day. Instead of a large stack of books in a to-read pile, choose one at a time. A large stack of books tends to foster the reading of a little of each one and completion of few.

For the teen who feels too awkward to read aloud with her parents, there is a fine bond you can form with your daughter in a book club for two. Perhaps you and your daughter can  choose a mother-daughter read (or a father-daughter read, or a family read) and discuss the book over dinner. You could even take her out to lunch or a picnic in the park. You can make it special and important that you share this experience of the book and talk about it. It is not necessary to finish the book in order to discuss it. Perhaps it will take four months to read a book. This means you can meet with your daughter four times at a picnic, or a café, or the living room and discuss this book together.

Another way to share books with your children is audiobooks. I once taught a student who knew of just about every Charles Dickens novel and would talk about the books with me. This student was in 7th grade at the time. While she did not have a full understanding of Dickens’s work, I was impressed and puzzled at how a 7th grader could know so many books by this author who takes most high schoolers some time and stamina to appreciate. I assumed she watched film adaptations. She later told me that her family drives to Canada every summer to visit relatives. For as long as she could remember, her parents would play an audiobook in the car of a Charles Dickens novel, filling her imagination with beautiful prose. She carries that experience with her to this day as an adult and as an English teacher.

The danger of a bad book may alarm us, but we can find comfort in the power of a good book; drown the evil in an abundance of good. Offer your daughter better books to intersperse within her to-read pile and stagger her too-quick reading. Your involvement makes the biggest difference in guiding your child’s moral literacy. Reading books as a family, listening to audiobooks during family car trips, initiating a mother-daughter book club, sharing titles and building a library for a culture of good books with other parents whose judgment you trust are some ways to inundate our children with good reading habits and fill their imagination, awakening what Joseph Pearce calls an “enchantment of reality,” a recognition of the delight that accompanies sanctity. 

Some resources which are available are listed here:

Books about books: