No. 60: If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late

Challenges from Book Tour

Three days into my COVEN book tour, I’m sitting in the San Jose Airport lounge, because my flight to Denver is delayed a few hours.

This is a normal part of book tour — flight delays — and your team will always blame the season, “ugh, winter!”, then “ugh, spring!”, and come fall, that too will earn its groans. It’s just impossible to do 10 flights in 10 days without some sort of hiccup, and I’ve come to enjoy the excitement of a few things going wrong to both add challenge and liven things up.

Challenge. That’s the word for this week’s diary. Because after hundreds of school visits over the past 12 years, there’s always, always a challenge at each new show. Today, for instance, in the middle of my presentation to a full auditorium, someone else’s phone hooked onto the theater’s Bluetooth speaker and started playing random Youtube instructional videos about setting up your desktop for maximum organization. Multiple faculty could not find the source of this Very Boring Voice of God and I had to work to get the kids back to the fun once the interruption was sorted out.

But challenge is another good word because it’s the overall theme of what I’m finding on this tour. Not just the challenge of getting kids to stay interested in books, let alone read them — but also the literal challenge being leveled against authors by power-flexing parents.

A word about the latter. Recently, I had a visit derailed by a single parent’s objection, with the reason being that I’ve written a book about… witches.

[Insert fart noise.]

Needless to say, the Wizard of Oz and Narnia and plenty of other books about witches have remained on the shelves in this parent’s purview, but there’s something objectionable about ‘my’ witches — that they do not die at the end, I suspect — and this crusading parent insisted on taking action.

In the old days, this action would consist of them stamping their feet and getting nowhere, since no one else agreed with them. And in the end, they’d demand their child opt out of the presentation, which would make everyone happy, including the child, because they’d inevitably sneak into the show and feel renegade.

But the rules are different now. A single parent can challenge a book, snarl it in bureaucracy, and abort an entire author school visit before it happens. It’s scary, actually. You can have 300 kids and their parents absolutely over-the-moon to have an author come talk about books and get kids off their screens and into their imaginations for a brief, shining moment — then have it preemptively ripped away by someone who thinks their feelings are more important than everyone else’s combined.

This never used to happen before. I’ve done nearly a thousand presentations of much edgier books than COVEN all around the world, including highly authoritarian countries and the reddest of red states, and fielded not a single complaint. For the simple reason that my presentation to students is about learning to look past surfaces and appearances and think critically about not just Good and Evil, but about everything they face in the world. (The religious schools are always the most enthusiastic audiences.)

But the world changed and schools lost power to parents, not collectively, but individually, whereby a single parent has an iron-clad veto over a school’s curriculum, giving them as much power as every member of the school’s faculty combined. (Not so dissimilar from a certain political party in the House of Representatives adding a rule that any single member can trigger a vote to expel the speaker.) Giving parents power is one thing. Giving each parent the power to disrupt a school’s entire community is another and it’s fallen hard on everyone from teachers to athletic coaches to authors trying to get in front of students and save books from becoming obsolete.

One school I visited is amongst my favorite in the country — I’ve presented there three times over the years, and it’s because the teacher who arranges my visits is an absolute Rock Star. The kind of teacher who changes lives and breeds a love of reading that will stick to these kids forever. You can feel the bond between her and her students. They will follow her to the ends of the earth.

But she told me things were about to change. The right to choose authors for school visits had been taken away from her. In fact, given the political climate, the entire act of having authors visit at all had become too laden with risk.

Challenge.

That’s the word.

One lobbed by a parent from far away. Up close, a thousand kids lose their rights to fall in love with books, like every generation did before.

So many authors I know have had their school visits disrupted. And as a result, schools are just doing less of them to avoid the hassle (I don’t blame them).

There are consequences. Books are losing favor amongst kids. There is a real epidemic going on at the ground level. And it’s hard for anyone to see, except traveling authors who are crisscrossing the country, witnessing the malaise first-hand, the lack of literacy, the fear of picking up a book because TikTok or video games or TV or Minecraft is so much easier.

Art by drwhofreak.

Think about it. If you, as an adult, are struggling to find time and attention to read, can you imagine a kid?

And yet, as I tell the kids, reading books at their age isn’t just a hobby. It’s mandatory for being a functional human. Because only by reading can you pump the muscle of your imagination and discover your own version of the stories. Stories that become a part of you, because they’re the movie in your head and only yours, which is why any Hollywood version of the book will inevitably ‘suck,’ as they say. And this is a good lesson to learn — that any visual always pales to your own private imagination and dreamscape — and it’s one you can only get by reading book after book after book, until you know that fact deep in your heart. That your imagination is superior to anyone else’s. That you can trust it. That you can trust yourself. A book is like Popeye’s spinach, straight to your soul. It’s what’ll later stop you from getting seduced by shallow imagery, whether it’s porn or propaganda or anything else that might entice at a surface level but can’t compete with the complexity and power of your mind’s own factory and the wealth of your experience, both imagined and lived.

This is a message I spread as gospel. I need to be on the ground, school by school to do it, like a traveling salesman — but schools, little by little, battered by heckling parents, are losing the energy and courage to have authors come in at all.

I’ll keep fighting, though.

This is my life’s work. To keep books in kids’ hands, to keep the muscles of their imagination strong and vibrant, to give them the tools to be true humans in the world rather than controlled automatons.

Tall order. But that’s what a challenge is.

Part of me wants to make a documentary about this. Follow me and a few other authors on our race to save kids’ minds before books go the way of VHS tapes. Put it on film for everyone to see. Hmmm…

Do you see kids losing touch with books? What should we do to fix it?

Until next week —