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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Tons.

Lots of graphic novels, so we’re not talking great literature here, but if they’re asking to go to the library 2x/week, I’m good with that.[/quote]

Pretty much this.

I'd estimate 80-100 graphic novels or long comic collections. Maybe more? I also read a few unillustrated novels to/with her. Rising 4th grader.

On some level, I'd prefer if she read more "regular" novels, but I think that desire isn't terribly rational, and I absolutely don't push it, ever, lest I make reading unillustrated books a chore-- which I don't think it is for her, per se. She's perfectly capable of reading them (mostly in school), enjoying them and gleaning deep meaning from them, and scores well into the 99th percentile on her MAP-R. I think she'll grow into reading more unillustrated work-- mainly because there are so many more great unillustrated works in print, and she won't want to miss them!-- but reading graphic novels is also not an immature way to read. It calls on slightly different skills, is all. And those skills are more and more useful as kids become, and everyone becomes, more visually literate.

I'm a writer, and briefly toyed with the idea of writing picture books. It's not an uncommon lament among people interested in writing them that the word count for picture books has gone WAY down in the past few decades. (Generally, they've remained about 32 pages, but with half the words they used to have.) This is often decried as the result of TV/videos, that kids don't have a long enough attention span, etc., etc. In fact, there is some truth to the influence of visual media like TV, but it's largely neutral to positive. Kids are more able to make sophisticated visual inferences about what is happening, so they simply don't need as many words. A picture is worth a thousand of them, right? A good picture, anyway. And decoding them is an important skill-- especially as (sophisticated!) pictures are increasingly the media we use to communicate, thanks to the Internet and so on.

I often think of one book in particular that illustrates why this shift isn't evidence of some obvious devolution. We have a ton of picture and easy reader books, mostly outgrown, almost all from the thrift store. We were sort of collecting Dr. Seuss and related books by that publisher at one point, and came across one called something like A Fish Out of Water. It's surely out of print, and for good reason, lol. It's... kind of entertaining, but loses its own plot, and doesn't tie up loose ends, among other things.

But what I really noticed was how redundant the text was and how thin the illustration-- while still entertaining, especially for the late 50s/early 60s (?) There were things like a whole page of (not a precise example)... "So I opened the basement door and went down the stairs," with a picture of a person going downstairs. Followed by "In the basement, I saw..." As a writer/editor, I could see how you'd now completely cut that first page, how little information it provided, how we expect audiences to be far more sophisticated now. You can just say you heard a noise in the basement, and jump to "in the basement, I saw...." Or even just show the person in the basement, and what they saw, with the words, "A giant FISH!" or whatever. You could even show a person upstairs, with a "BUMP! CRASH!" coming from a basement door, then, on the next page, they're downstairs-- showing huffing/puffing and "speed" lines, and stairs behind them-- with a shocked face and a giant fish. You hardly need words. And you definitely don't need to waste an entire page on their walking downstairs, and if you do, you don't need to also write "So I opened the basement door and went down the stairs."

(And yes, an easy reader can be helpfully redundant-- helping kids decode via context-- but let's just say this one was way over the top in terms of redundancy, by today's measures. Elephant and Piggie is more where it's at.)

Now, that's just one picture/easy reader book, and there's tons to be gained from unillustrated ones. But making visual inferences is a great skill, pictures with words support literacy, and many graphic novels have higher level vocabulary and more sophisticated storylines than unillustrated work. I'd as soon have my kid reading a book like "Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy" or "Pie in the Sky" (more of a hybrid graphic novel) or one of the Holm "Sunny" books as one of the unillustrated Sweet Valley Twins or Babysitters' Club novels I was sucking up by the dozens around the same age. [/quote]

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