Every now and then —

I drop in at Amanda Hocking’s blog. You know, for a Famous Person who gets coopted to be an Example To Us All on a fairly frequent basis, she has a very balanced perspective.

I rather like this, for example.

Not that she reaches important conclusions, but she makes good comments. Like here:

I don’t know what this means, exactly, or what the answer to the problem is. Why teenage boys aren’t reading is actually a multifacted problem, and this answer isn’t as simple as changing the cover of a book. But Jo Rowling had to go by J. K. Rowling because the publisher didn’t think boys would read a book written by a girl.

I do think that this may be more of an intrinsic difference between boys and girls and less of a problem to solve, you know? Here’s an intriguing comment from Hocking’s blog:

It sounds like the issue is reading. My brother is turning into a bigger Jane Austen fan than me, but will he read one of her books? Noooo. My husband is an online news junkie and loves sci-fi – so long as it’s on NetFlix. He doesn’t read books, let alone Twilight, but he enjoyed the movie and couldn’t give a rats ass whether the book was written by a female, male or extraterrestrial so long as it’s entertaining.

Women, in general, are better at visualization. Books play like movies in our heads as we read them. A lot of guys don’t read that way.

Isn’t that an interesting suggestion? If true, it would certainly seem to follow that boys would read less than girls — intrinsically.

But if I had a boy-type kid, I’d have a lot of gross-humor and horror type books and comics and things lying around the house, if that’s what he liked.

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