Summary: The Boys Club

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One of the perennial challenges school librarians is creating male readers, regardless of age or school setting. However, in today’s increasingly fast-paced society, it is particularly hard to reach adolescent males with the gospel of reading. Many of them have been scarred by years of painful reading experiences in school, weakened by little to no exposure to print and meaningful literary experiences outside of it, and a distracted by a plethora of extracurricular activities and entertainment alternatives that knock recreational reading several notches down their priority lists. While no social, racial, or ethnic class is exempt from this issue, and good readers can be found all over the socioeconomic and ethnographic spectrums, the struggle …show more content…
Alfred W. Tatum notes that many books that teachers select for their assigned reading focus for black teen males feature black teen males as protagonists and include discussions of gangs, drugs, violence, peer pressure, and “beating the odds” (43), though he discourages the use of such “oversaturated” books in favor of more diverse texts (45). In The Boys Club: Male Protagonists in Contemporary African American Young Adult Literature, Wendy Rountree notes the importance and prevalence of violence and basketball in African American male youth culture and literature (14). While these topics may not necessarily be ideal for nourishing what Tatum calls “meaningful literacy exchanges with texts” (35), they are crucial for opening the door to black teen males with limited interests in reading but passionate interests in other areas, such as sports, rap music, and gang life. In fact, this is exactly why nonfiction is so valuable for black teen males: they can explore their interests in a way that engages them with the printed page. For this reason, magazines and newspapers (particularly sports pages) are also valuable resources for increasing male readership, and not just among black students. Biographies of pop culture figures are also excellent avenues to engage teen readers, though books about …show more content…
Perhaps the head of the class is Walter Dean Myers, a prolific author with numerous awards and accolades to his name whose career spans over forty years (Cart 136). Judith A. Hayn and Sarah M. Burns go as far as to call him “the master storyteller for young men growing up in Harlem” (137-138). Among his noteworthy titles are Monster, about a young man facing a murder trial, Sunrise in Fallujah, the story of a black soldier in the Iraq war, and Harlem Summer, a work of historical fiction about an aspiring jazz musician. Another one of the most powerful voices in young adult literature for African American is Christopher Paul Curtis, who is best known for his historical fiction novels Bud, Not Buddy and The Watsons Go to Birmingham ‒ 1963 as well as the provocative Bucking the Sarge. Sharon Draper and Sharon Flake are female authors who powerfully portray the urban experience as well (Hayn and Burns 138-139). Draper’s Battle of Jericho, a novel about poularity and peer pressure, rates highly among young black males (Tatum 43-45). Many of these readers may also identify with Flake’s Bang!, which features a thirteen-year old protagonist coping with the loss of his younger brother in a community torn apart by violence (Hayn and Burns 139). Another author of note who has recently started writing for young audiences is Omar
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