Did books influence your action as a kid?
After responding to a comment about this uproar over my earlier comments comparing a young adult book to an adult fantasy series, I realized that an even more interesting facet might be readers’ stories about whether they think novels they read as kids actually influenced their behavior in any way.
In other words, did reading a made-up story result in any real-life action - for good or bad??
It isn’t easy to say that reading x resulted in y. But you may think it had an effect on your actions.
For instance: this is pretty nerdy, but as a young kid (around middle school and younger) I loved dogs. (I still love them, but I was pretty animal-obsessed as a girl.) I read a lot of dog stories, fiction and nonfiction before I was a teen, even the old-fashioned stuff like “Lad of Sunnybank” by Albert Payson Terhune (published in 1929, I believe).
Anyway, his dog stories, along with other books, reinforced, if nothing else, my interest in dogs and helped inspire me to save up for a show-quality golden retriever, take it to dog classes and shows.
The interest was already there. But the books reinforced it and may have helped lead to some of the action. I certainly think they did.
So if girls read nothing but books about gossipy cliques, shopping or drugs or sex…. nevermind. Just share a story about your own history with books if you want.
As a teenager, I read numerous adult fantasy and fiction books. (I rarely read juvenile or YA fiction when I was younger. ) None of the books I read in my teenage years had any negative effects on me. I did not attempt to imitate anything that I read in my books. No drugs, sex, etc. At 23, I am not far off from knowing what it was like to be a teenager, or knowing what teens today are like.
The girls who were doing drugs, drinking alcohol, and having sex in high school were the same girls who looked at my like I was insane because I liked to read for fun. So they certainly were not being influenced by mature content in a book.
If a teenage boy or girl is going to do things that they may not be ready for, it is most likely not going to be because of a fade-to-black sex scene, mature language, or some drug use in a YA book. Teens are probably going to be more influenced by the worse things they see on basic cable television shows and in movies. Teens know more and do more sexually then when I was even in high school….and it is probably not because a few mildly suggestive scenes in a YA book.
At least, that is how I see things today.
You’re lucky you weren’t a teen in 1973 when “Fear of Flying” by Erica Jong came out.
Of course that book was thought to have real influence during the sexual revolution.
Maybe, as Jonathan Franzen has written, novels have lost a lot of their social influence.
I was reading adult fiction at eleven (1977), and gee, I don’t drink, don’t smoke, and was not sexually active until I married.
Perhaps my reading enabled me to see the negative consequences of looking cool doing stupid things, instead of promoting the stupid behaviour.