Quantifying Reader Appeal
(This post is mostly for teachers and librarians.)
I'm a big fan of Nate Silver's political analysis at fivethirtyeight, a numbers-based blog that predicted the election results with astonishing accuracy.
I'm no Nate Silver, but I am interested in how writers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers can better understand the immense amount of information available to us online about how teenagers read, what they read, and (perhaps most importantly) what they like.
Our current methods of analysis almost always involve extremely small sample sizes--i.e., the teenagers at my library or school do/do not like this book; this book does/does not circulate in my library system; the teens on the BBYA panel thought this was derivative, or exciting, or deep, or funny, or lame, or too long.
This is of course very useful information, but it's ultimately anecdotal. We're asking ten or twenty teens to speak for ten or twenty thousand. The sample size is tiny, and too often we make broad conclusions from it.
So while School Library Journal courts controversy by saying that children didn't like several recent Newbery winners, they don't feel compelled to provide any actual evidence to back up the claim.
Also, to use an example I've used many times before, adults often say that "their teens" do not like or get Octavian Nothing. The conventional wisdom then becomes that Octavian is a great book; i.e., that no one would ever choose to read it. But why then have more than 100,000 people purchased it--making it a bigger commercial success than most "commercial" fiction published for teens?
I think we may have a way (albeit a still-flawed way*) of better quantifying reader appeal, and the results--to me, at least--were kind of stunning.
Okay. So there is hugely popular web site called goodreads.** Most popular YA books have THOUSANDS of ratings on goodreads--so instead of dealing with ten kids, or a hundred kids, we're dealing with, say, three thousand kids. Also, they aren't mediating their ratings through us--aren't trying to meet or subvert our adult expectations. Here are some of the surprising and not surprising things one learns from goodreads ratings:
1. My least-liked novel is An Abundance of Katherines--out of 2100 ratings, the average if 4.09 stars out of 5. (Paper Towns is the best-liked of the books, with an average rating of 4.38; Alaska is rated 4.36.)
2. If we assume that a rating of 4 or 5 stars constitutes an enjoyable read, a higher percentage of people report having enjoyed Octavian Nothing 2 than report having enjoyed Twilight. (Most of the Octavian responders are teenagers, at least per my random checks.)
3. This year's (excellent!) Printz Award winner, Jellicoe Road, has been called by some inaccessible to teen readers. The goodreads evidence indicates otherwise: With an admittedly-small-sample size of 122 ratings, its average rating of 4.43 is actually higher than any of the Printz honor books.
4. The most popular YA book of the year--ratings-wise--is Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games--which you may recall I told the New York Times I liked a lot--with an average of 4.69 out of 3824 ratings.
5. Some books we consider commercially beloved may not be: Looking for Alaska and Gossip Girl 1 have almost the exact same number of ratings--50% of readers gave Gossip Girl 4 or 5 stars; 80% of readers gave 4 or 5 stars to Alaska. (The same holds true for most of the books listed below; they just have fewer ratings.
(Of course all this begs the question: Should a writer's chief goal be an enjoyable reading experience? Ulysses, for instance, has a lower average rating than any of my books; does this somehow mean that I'm a better writer than James Joyce? I think not, but that's for another post.)
I've listed some others below in case you're curious. I don't think metadata can replace the anecdotal reports librarians and teachers get from their readers, but I do think it can supplement those reports--and remind us all that the readers we have are not the only readers we might have.
Paper Towns
1357 ratings
4.38 average
42% 5 stars
38% 4 stars
14% 3 stars
3% 2 stars
0% 1 star
An Abundance of Katherines
2105 ratings
4.09 average
31% 5 stars
41% 4 stars
20% 3 stars
4% 2 stars
1% 1 star
Looking for Alaska
3176 ratings
4.36 average rating
47% 5 stars
33% 4 stars
14% 3 stars
3% 2 stars
1% 1 star
Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
931 ratings
4.12 average
33% 5 stars
41% 4 stars
19% 3 stars
3% 2 stars
1% 1 star
Octavian Nothing 2
183 ratings
4.46 average rating
47% 5 stars
34% 4 stars
12% 3 stars
6% 2 stars
0% 1 star
Nation
563 ratings
4.30 average
46% 5 stars
39% 4 stars
11% 3 stars
1% 2 stars
0% 1 star
Twilight
105457 ratings
4.24 average rating
53% 5 stars
24% 4 stars
13% 3 stars
5% 2 stars
2% 1 star
Breaking Dawn
53415 ratings
4.05 average rating
45% 5 stars
26% 4 stars
16% 3 stars
7% 2 stars
4% 1 star
Jellicoe Road
122 ratings
4.43 average
57% 5 stars
26% 4 stars
8% 3 stars
3% 2 stars
4% 1 star
Hunger Games
3824 ratings
4.69 average rating
63% 5 stars
30% 4 stars
5% 3 stars
0% 2 stars
0% 1 star
Perks of Being a Wallflower
12473 ratings
4.03 average rating
36% 5 stars
34% 4 stars
20% 3 stars
6% 2 stars
2% 1 star
(Why don't these numbers add up to 100, you ask. It seems that goodreads always rounds down, meaning that the numbers can add up to as little as 96. Annoying, I know.)
* Said flaws begin with the fact that a lot of the people who rate YA books on goodreads are not, in fact, YAs. However, this may skew things in not-the-way-you'd-expect. At least from my cursory glance through reviews of Paper Towns and The Disreputable History..., teens seem to rate the books more highly than adults do.
But there are many other reasons not to just take goodreads ratings at face value. For instance, as a book gets more ratings, its average rating tends to sink, if only because a one-star review pulls things down so much. Above you'll see that the average rating for the contemporary classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower are outrageously low. (Speak is also low considering how much teens love it.) At first, I thought you could get around this by not counting the one-star ratings, but you actually can't, which makes me wonder whether maybe as a book gets out to a very wide audience, you just find more people who don't have very many enjoyable reading experiences.
Also, goodreads ratings obviously overvalue kids with high-speed internet access.
But none of this really distracts from what I'm trying to argue, which is that a LOT of teens REALLY LIKE the books that many people presume teens won't like, and that a lot of young people have more enjoyable reading experiences with ambitious work than they do with books that pander to their dreams and desires.
** I find goodreads' user interface annoying and prefer librarything, but goodreads is much more popular with teens, who so far as I can tell enjoy annoying user interfaces.
posted by John Green @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009
44 Comments
44 Comments:
Thanks for sharing all this, John. I have a LibraryThing account but hadn't heard about Goodreads. While I don't work at a public or school library (I'm at a university), my goal is to one day become a YA librarian and something like this could be really helpful. I wonder if there's a way to sort reviews by age group... I suppose probably not, it doesn't look like you're required to list it. Interesting!
"Also, goodreads ratings obviously overvalue kids with high-speed internet access."
I don't really know why, but this made me laugh out loud. I am completely in love with The Perks of Being A Wallflower - but I don't know how to describe what a good book it is. I think I'm due for a reread, anyway.
GoodRead's interface is annoying but does alot of things that Librarything does not do. I've wanted to have a site with a good interface to track my reading for a long time but have yet to find one. I tried to build my own with limited success: http://booksiamreading.com/stefanhayden
Yeah, teens definitely love to read more than people might think. One of the libraries I work at even has a Teen Advisory Board! All they do is discuss books and plan events for teens at the library. I wish I'd known about that when I was a teen so I could have joined. (Although is that really any surprise given that I work at two libraries? ha. I doubt it. I also wish my mother had taken me to Story Time.)
I think this is another good anecdotal way of looking at it, and does get a bigger sample, but I wonder if it is skewed in other ways, too. For example, it seems like very few people rate things as a 1 or 2. Does that mean they're not reading any books they don't like? Does it mean they're not posting everything they read? Does it mean there are a lot of books that they start, don't like, and don't finish, so they don't get posted? But, could be as true of Twilight as Octavian Nothing, so...I don't know.
However, I think you're definitely right that we (librarians as a group) tend to miss the mark a lot on What Teens Will Like and What Teens Can Handle. Thanks for always making such thoughtful posts about it. I wonder how one would conduct a true, scientific study of it. Hmmm.
Former teacher/ Future librarian...
On one hand, you are essentially right - teenagers WILL read quality books, and when they do they usually love them. Again, my evidence for this is anecdotal, of course, but I've found similar result teaching in four different schools with VERY different socio-economic backgrounds.
On the other hand, my second point is really based off of that last portion of the first comment. Teens from higher end socio-economic backgrounds read VERY differently than those who come from a lower socio-economic background. The teens who populate a place like goodreads are, on the whole, those whose families and peers value reading highly. That is still a very small portion of the teenagers in the country. I worked for a research grant in South Carolina for a time, and those students (at six middle schools) and the rural Ohio students I taught first read nothing like the books that you have mentioned. Those texts were simply high above their level of reading and they could not relate to the characters in them because their lives were so foreign. These students are far more likely (if they read for pleasure at all) to read books that are in the "high interest/ low vocabulary" field. I can't think of the name of the series that was really popular, but the standard series (loosely defined) was about Urban Youth With Problems (bullying, death, etc). They were terribly written, but this was the world they could relate to the best. In the high schools, a teacher could assign a book like "Speak," and those who read it would love it, but more of the students would choose to read "Go Ask Alice" because that world seems much more accessible to them. I've never taught a high school student who loved "Perks," which disappoints me greatly - however, I've also not yet met a college student who didn't love it, oddly enough.
(I can find some of the articles that I've used to study that split and send copies your way if you'd like; I think it's pretty interesting.)
So, basically, you are half correct. It absolutely depends on the culture from which the students approach their reading. There are many students, I would say more than half, who can't see the world through your characters' eyes because they are not as intelligent as the characters you write and because their lives haven't been as easy. And those aren't the kids who sign up for a reading network account... if they get on the internet at all, it's just myspace (facebook is used by that higher socio-economic group).
I guess you hear that anecdotal stuff from teachers and librarians because we deal with pretty good cross-section of all students.
Oh, one more thought when re-reading... those students who don't enjoy books like yours and Octavian Nothing also N.E.V.E.R. buy books. If they purchase reading material, it is magazines.
If you can't tell, this is a concept I'm really interested in. *blush*
I'm glad that you mentioned that this is going to trend heavily on the side of kids who have regular internet access. I would also add that this is a self-selecting group - the kids who are keeping track of their reading on a site like Goodreads are probably teens who define themselves as readers. You're most likely missing out on the opinions of kids who read more casually. That might, in part, be why books that fall on the "popular" side of YA lit, like Gossip Girl, are not getting as many ratings here.
Early responses:
1. biblauragraphy: It is a self-selecting group, but because it's such a popular facebook application, it doesn't self-select only people who read a lot of books as much as other book reading sites. (And for the record, teen advisory groups self-select in the same way.)
And the point about gossip girls is well-taken, but (interesting fact) "Alaska" has sold better than the first "GG" book in the last year, and since they have a similar number of ratings, it's reasonable to assume they have a similar ratio of readers to ratings.
But it's totally true that we have no way of knowing what the "average" reader of GG (or Alaska or anything) thinks. This is just a way of maybe getting closer.
2. Melissa: You're absolutely right that a lot of sixteen-year-olds don't have the reading skills to read "Octavian" . I'm just arguing that people are wrong when they assume that such books aren't popular or commercially viable.
There should be (and are!) a lot of choices available to appeal to different kinds of readers.
Goodreads may provide a large sampling of teens, but not a broad one. Most are white, middle class, and belonging to families or social circles who value intellectualism. I work in a large public library with many teens who read constantly and have probably never heard of Goodreads. I imagine the books they choose to read and how they rate them would be quite different.
I really appreciate your thoughts here. I'm actually participating in a class discussion right now about whether or not the award stamp on a book drives away teen readers (I don't think it does).
The only problem that I see is that Goodreads really likes teens that like Goodreads. I would assume those people already like to read, and like to read deep material (which explains the low ratings of Twilight and the like). A population taken from a classroom would probably be more diverse.
If it were part of a high school English curriculum for every student to create an account and read/review books read for the class and pleasure, I wonder how much the ratings would change.
Thank goodness, John, the trend of terribly-written YA books is changing slowly... At least there are many more options than there were when I was a teen (*shudder*). However, I think like most big business decisions, it just takes time. We all have seen the changes long before those who hold the money will really start to invest in that newer concept of teen readership because those stereotypes are pretty strong.
As a future librarian, I agree that many underestimate teens and their intellectual abilities. I mean, sure, there are many teens that do just want to read books like Gossip Girl, but there are many others who, while may liking to read the lighter things as well, also love books like The Book Thief and Octavian Nothing.
Just because these people don't get online and rate them at a site like goodreads doesn't mean they aren't reading them-- and enjoying them.
I don't know if someone has already mentioned this, but it also may be interesting to see if there is a correlation between teens who do read the more popular books only (Twilight, etc.) and those who are online at book rating sites. Maybe teens who do read these intellectually challenging books just don't spend as much time online?
That wasn't necessarily the case for me, for it could be for many. Probably not, actually, but just a thought.
Anne and anonymous both comment perceptively on the inherent bias of the goodreads reviewer being self-selective.
Which is true, as I note in the post.
But there are more than 100,000 ratings of Twilight. That's a lot of people. It's not complete, but neither are our current metrics. I think they can feed each other.
Like I said, goodreads isn't anything approaching a good metric. But if our current metrics aren't good either (and they aren't!!!!), then maybe adding more flawed ones, and weighting against the flaws, will help.
So in that sense, this post is just a beginning. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments.
Because I think you're a genius, I hate to nitpick anything you say...but isn't there a flaw in your own argument here? Don't the goodreads numbers suggest that teens AREN'T reading Octavian Nothing? Granted, those that do read it are appreciating it, but it looks like many teen readers are, in fact, passing it by.
I don't see how you can make the argument in point 2 of this post that more teens enjoy Octavian Nothing to Twilight given that Twilight has gotten a considerable amount of more ratings.
Those are interesting thoughts.
Another bias which should be noted, I think, is that some books are required high school reads (for instance, Speak and The Perks of Being a Wallflower are often on school reading lists). Such books will be read by teens who did NOT choose them, while more "obscure" books will be chosen, most often by the reader him/herself (though they could be gifts). I think a teen will choose according to criteria such as: author previously read and loved, friends recommendations, back cover, etc. Chosen books will be much more likely to match the reader's taste --and of course a "bad" teacher might be able to spoil a good book.
I also think that piepie's remark is a good one: one needs to look at actual numbers in addition to percentage.
I've never heard of goodreads, I use shelfari. I'm looking on there right now and realized that, hile you can rate and type out a review for a book, I can't find a way to see the average rating of the book...I found stars that show ratings among my friends, the community, and on Amazon, but there's no way to see the totaly number of raters...guess I'm changing sites...oh, and John, you got 5 stars on all your books rated by my friends, lol.
Hmm, I'm curious to see how The Book Thief holds up on goodreads. I just wrote a review that disputes its categorization as Young Adult fiction, but I bet I'm way off..haha.
jake-the-girl
www.ggpreviews.blogspot.com
This is an excellent discussion, so thanks, John. For all the talk of self-selection, I would also like to point out that this is even more true for readers of a book like Octavian 2, since ostensibly people who did not enjoy Octavian 1 would not choose to read the sequel. Thus it makes sense that the group who chose to read the sequel would have a higher rating than the group who read the first book. This I would guess is true of any sequel, since it seems like a necessary hurdle that readers would have to enjoy the first book to an appropriate level to choose to read the subsequent books. This would likely eliminate the people who rated the original book poorly. Of course it is possible that readers would not enjoy a sequel as much as they did the first book, but I would argue that it is more likely that since they enjoyed the author's work previously they would also enjoy the sequels. Perhaps different standards should be used for books that are the first in a series vs. subsequent books or whether they are stand-alone novels such as yours.
Amy points out that since Octavian 2 has so few ratings, maybe that indicates that teens aren't reading it. I don't think so; I think it's due to the fact that it came out very recently and it's very long so takes a while to finish.
Shannon's point about self-selection within self-selection in the second volume is a good one, although I think my point still holds that at least on goodreads teens seem to report good reading experiences with a huge variety of ambitious work. And this is not five hundred teens or a thousand, but tens of thousands--enough teens, in fact, to support a book in a (very) profitable way.
I rate on Goodreads, because I like to keep track of what I reading and my friends that are on there.I have read all of the Printz except Tender Morsels and Octavian Nothing 2, which are in my massive too read pile. I really enjoyed Jellicoe Road, Nation, and Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. They were all cleverly written and I adored the characters.
I know that teens read more and that there are a lot of great books for them. As a teen, my to-read list is going to take years to make it more managed. I know that I self select books, but I also take in to fact, what my friends are reading, the cover, and authors past work.
When I searched "Paper Towns" in goodreads, Madame Bovary was the top result.
Okay, this is entirely off-topic, but I think you need to see it:
www(dot)cornify(dot)com
Team Zombie's worst nightmare!!
I haven't read "Octavian Nothing" yet (it's on the list for this semester), but I have noticed that very few high school students in my region are reading historical fiction. Middle schoolers are slightly more likely to pick one up, but on the whole students seem to be choosing books that are written in their own time period (with the obvious exceptions of fantasy and science fiction).
Ultimately, I think the only thing teachers and librarians can do is the same thing that the good ones have been doing for years: share the best books with passion & enthusiasm and hope that one will reach a few more readers. :)
I just spent the last five hours reading Octavian Nothing 1, and I REALLY LIKED it. So there you go. One more teen to take into account.
I'm a teen and I just finished both volumes of Octavian's story, it was amazing. I read both of them in a very short time span, they were so good I couldn't stop reading. So there's one more teen that you know can comprehend Octavian.
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I would like to add a few qualifiers from my own experience as a teen reader. I've had a goodreads account for nearly three years, and have found it occasionally frustrating because there are only five stars. Consider the equivalencey:
one star = didn't like it
two stars = it was ok
three stars = liked it
four stars = really liked it
five stars = it was amazing
This is a pretty skewed way to go about rating things. It's like taking ten stars and then dropping (for instance) 1, 2, 4, 6, & 9. There is no way that the math will completely reflect how readers feel about a book.
My only other quibble with taking ratings from goodreads is that often, only the books that make an impression as either horrible or fantastic reading are the books recorded. There are a lot of books that just aren't memorable enough to mark down unless one has a rigorous habit of recording every single book read.
With that said, I am going to rush off and spend some time on goodreads right now.
ok so I love//hate when you do this. Love because it's so interesting. Hate because it's too interesting. Now I want to read Octavian Nothing. Which yes, may seem like a great thing, but i am a college student with 20 books to read for school alone, and no time to read for fun. So now i have to wait all the way till summer. And as for Speak, I really hated that book. With a passion. I never understood its appeal or any of Anderson's writing. You're right though because your books and Lockhart's books are very good!
--Brittany
I just don't like the amount of condescending reading material for teenagers. A lot of books are dumbed down, and if they aren't, like Octavian Nothing, then we're not expected to understand it or appreciate it. I read Octavian Nothing and didn't like it. It just wasn't to my tastes. Many people who've heard that have told me to re-read it in a couple years, automatically assuming that appreciation and enjoyment are one and the same.
ok this is pretty much completely off topic of this blog and i apologize, but im re-reading looking for alaska b/c i don't know I have about five books i reread all the time. Anyways, I had a sort of random question about the book.
I just wanted to know how you thought of Pudge always thinking of how many layers he is away from Alaska or Lara too at times. I just think that's an incredibly ingenious idea. It was just something I really loved and wondered if that's how you thought or just something you came up with. Again, apologies for the randomness. I just love that notion.
In sort of relation to the blog, though, I love Perks of Being a Wallflower. It was intriguing and clever. Clever books about smart things are just better.
Oh and I really love your novels as well if that isn't clear. :)
John, you wouldn't happen to have come across the 538 site because of ze frank's blog, would you?
I thought this was really interesting, and I'm neither a librarian, nor am I a teacher. :) Thanks for posting this.
"(This post is mostly for teachers and librarians.)" Is kinda underestimating the interest of other readers isn't it? :P I like posts which come without disclaimers!
I loved reading your blog and all the other comments. I think my main quibble with goodreads is again, the star system. Since I doubt all teens will assign the same value to each star rating.
Also I really want to read Octavian Nothing now (and also Chains by LHA since we're talking about historical fiction) but I don't think my school library has either book :(.
Another aspect of goodreads is authors "gaming" the system. I think that when you have hundreds or thousands of reviews this doesn't affect it as much, but before a book comes out or before it gets a lot of reviews I think it can matter a great deal.
For example, I know someone whose debut books is coming out later this year and has a ton of five star reviews but almost all of them are from her, her family, her family's boy/girlfriends, and their friends. This skews the ranking and can actually cause other readers to skew their own evaluation of the book as well (as I've seen happen when one teen rated it low and then commented that maybe she needed to reevaluate her opinion after seeing how many people loved the book).
I think you should invite Nate Silver to investigate this problem and see what he thinks about how to best analyze this kind of data. He's got a lot less going on now that the elections over and baseball hasn't started yet...That guy's mind is pretty amazing; I think it would be interesting to see what he'd have to say. Thanks for beginning an interesting conversation.
John, I think you're right about dealing with small sample sizes in individual schools and libraries. I've had a rather interesting experience in this matter. I used to lead a book discussion group for teens in a library in a very poor neighborhood. They loved books, but the books they chose to read were generally urban fiction or books with a high level of humor, like the Ally Carter books. They also really loved goodreads, and would sign in using the library computers, because some of them had no internet access at home, and some only had dial-up. If a teenager in a low income neighborhood can find a computer to use to check myspace, they can find a computer to use for goodreads. I've seen it done.
I left that job and went to work in a very affluent part of town, and the circulation trends in teen fiction were vastly different. I had to rework my book pitches and start reading different types of books in order to recommend things my new customer base would like. It taught me that you can't really ever say "teenagers like this," or "teenagers think these things."
Essentially, I think the difficulty in nailing down what teens like is that in most places, teen fiction is not categorized by genre. It's easier to look at adult readers and think, "this is the trend for romance," or "science fiction readers expect this." In most libraries and bookstores I've visited, Adult fiction is separated by genre, while kid and teen fiction is all lumped together. It makes things a little harder to quantify.
As for the goodreads/librarything debate, I find goodreads much easier to use. Of course, according to my birthdate, I'm technically a part of the Millennial generation, so it may just be that my brain is more like the modern teen brain than the modern adult brain.
Helene,
I just had a discussion along similar lines with a teen volunteer at my library recently. He was essentially asking why schools made kids read particular books - or really any particular book at all - since all it did was make kids hate the book. I argued that the point wasn't so much to like that particular book, but to learn overall reading/comprehension/analytical skills. I don't think I ever really convinced him.
As far as the main topic -
Most of my understanding of what teens do and don't like comes not from school or libraries but from working at a B&N. While the is still the issue of sample size, it's a little but different because the people deciding what to stock our store with are using both data from our store in particular and data from the country overall. So I'm not just hearing what teens say as they come in or how they react to my recs, but also how the number of copies of different kinds of book change over the years.
With that said, my impression is not that kids do like challenging stuff or don't like long, boring books but that different teens, being people, read different things. How well written they want the book to be depends on if it's escapism or meant to be thought provoking - just like with adults. (beach reads vs. "literature")
As far as sales go, stuff like Gossip Girls, Twilight, SVH, etc. grows huge fast and then fizzles out and pretty much disappears eventually. Stuff like An Abundance of Katherines, Octavian Nothing, and Speak plops in with a moderate sized splash, seems to start to disappear, but then hangs on and possibly continues to grow.
So, I don't find the sales of Gossip Girl vs. Alaska all that surprising. My guess is that not only will GG continue to decline but also that Alaska will increase or remain steady for quite a while.
"And the point about gossip girls is well-taken, but (interesting fact) "Alaska" has sold better than the first "GG" book in the last year, and since they have a similar number of ratings, it's reasonable to assume they have a similar ratio of readers to ratings."
Why is it reasonable to assume that? I mean, I wouldn't rule out the possibility but it seems rather counter-intuitive to me.
Now, I certainly wouldn't argue the type of teen who reads Alaska is more likely to fill out ratings than the type of teen who reads Gossip Girl. Especially since there is likely a lot of overlap - my cousin loved loved loved both Gossip Girls and An Abundance of Katherine's. (muchos gracias for signing a copy of latter for me to give to her a year or so ago, btw - I was a favored cousin for a while there)
However, Alaska is more the kind of book that one feels compelled to discuss - in depth -with other people. Gossip Girls, not so much. Also, a teen's need for a Gossip Girl fix is more likely to be filled by the official website or the show or by reading the myriad of sequels and spinoffs. Alaska, not so much. I think that a teen that finishes Alaska is more likely to go looking for a place like goodreads compared to a teen that finishes Gossip Girls - even when the former and the latter teen are one in the same.
dear john,
i'm a librarian and i'm bummed i missed my free drink! :) another time perhaps...
i applaud your blog post to teachers and librarians about the limited methods we tend to use to anticipate and then quantify our teen readers' reactions to books. there are many of us in the profession, myself included, who at times are guilty of relying only on anecdotal "evidence" when developing the collection. but i have to say, sometimes it works.
had it not been for a friend and fellow y.a. librarian @ the san francisco public library telling me how much her teen patrons "LOVED" looking for alaska, i might never have read it and LOVED it myself.
alaska became the first book our fledgling book club read together. i thought it might be a tough sell to diverse urban teens, and i was awed as big tough teens from san francisco's mission district and potrero hill neighborhoods who'd never finished a book cover-to-cover ever devoured and adored alaska, too! take a look: http://theisabookclub.weebly.com
to this day, alaska remains 1 of only 2 titles i have ever re-read in my brief but bookish life. (i was an english major and a high school english teacher and am now a high school librarian.) and that's why i booktalk her any chance i get! :)
in fact later this month i'll be booktalking alaska again for 300+ rabid librarians who will be gathered in san jose to hear nancy pearl talk about teens and books. http://santaclara.k12oms.org/eventdetail.php?id=19986&gid=203
i was asked to present with nancy in the second session (subtitled how not to suck at booktalking). why me? i don't know, i guess i was having a drink with the right person at the right time. :)
anyway, i am grateful for (as well as sometimes somewhat wary of) the anecdotal ways readers share titles they love and hate. your blog post reminds us teachers and librarians to take in the many other valid forms of data (like votes on good reads) and not be so quick to think that we know best what young adults will read and love but rather to look for and promote ways to allow our awesome teen readers to decide for themselves. :)
thanks for the free drink offer, john. if you're in chicago for the a.l.a. annual conference (july 9-15) you may have more than 1 librarian hitting you up for a raincheck! :) but if you're ever in san francisco or sonoma, let me know, and i'll buy you a drink! :)
smiles,
anna koval :)
teacher/librarian
www.bighouselibrary.com
A word about goodreads; it's not so much that as a teen i like annoying interfaces so much as the fact that when i got to 200 on librarything it asked me for money to continue adding books, and money i do not have.
Thanks for this post. IT was fascinating. And I am now leaking a pinkish fluid from my ears.
I think one way to account for the lower ratings on more popular books is that people who might not otherwise have chosen said book may have felt pressured to do so by all the rave reviews or by having their friends/family members/teachers/librarians pushing it on them. Plus with all the hype surrounding very popular books, it's easy to be disappointed when actually reading a book. If you expect a three-star read and the book exceeds your expectations, then it'll often earn four stars, just because it's such a pleasant surprise. But if you expect a five-star read because it's been built up so much before the reader actually gets to the book, then anything that isn't spectacular will often get knocked down a rating or two just because it didn't meet these lofty expectations. Needless to say, such a build-up is more common with books that are already very popular.
You remind me so much of my ninth grade geometry teacher. He's one of my favorite people in the whole world, and I didn't even realize that's one of the things that makes me like your blogs so much till I read this one. :)
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