Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy have also purchased Best Books for Boys: A Resource for Educators (Children's and Young Adult Literature Reference) by Matthew D. Zbaracki. For this reason, you might like to know that Best Books for Boys: A Resource for Educators (Children's and Young Adult Literature Reference) will be released on April 30, 2008.
Best Books for Boys: A Resource for Educators (Children's and Young Adult Literature Reference)
Matthew D. Zbaracki
Price: $45.00
Release Date: April 30, 2008
Okay, I don't know about you, but I think that's stretching it a bit. Maybe little Johnny on the cover there is thumbing through Blood Meridian, salivating over the scalping scenes, wondering what it would be like to have his chest ripped apart by a barrage of bullets, but I doubt it. So what's the correlation here? After reading Blood Meridian am I supposed to have some deep burning desire to calm some kid down with a Lloyd Alexander book? Hey, maybe Cormac McCarthy will write a J-Fiction novel called No Country for Young Punks.
On a slightly more serious note, I was in a library not long ago (not in the same county where I work) and saw Blood Meridian in the teen section. I also saw Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. These books weren't incorrectly shelved; there were multiple copies. And I'm pretty sure the copies of The Things They Carried had "7" stickers (for seventh grade) along the spines.
Is someone assigning middle and high school kids to read books like Blood Meridian and The Things They Carried? Don't get me wrong, these are both great books and I imagine lots of high school kids could handle them, but middle school kids? My question is what are they not teaching in order to teach these books? I don't mean to be a prude, but seems a little odd to me.
Or maybe Cormac is just expanding his territory...
3 comments:
Man, those marketers... They never stop trying, do they?
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Yeah, I suppose some of those books are probably on lists, things you can choose from. I remember reading all the Ray Bradbury books on the list before I had to choose something else.
The Things They Carried I know is often summer reading in high school, but I'm not sure about McCarthy.
Last year Amazon recommended that I read On Chesil Beach because I rated I Love You, Beth Cooper. Hmmmm, Booker Prize winner and a former writer on The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. Sure, that makes sense.
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