Another day, another list of books to read. More desperate cajoling. This time it's specifically boys who are being targeted. Boys don't read enough, you see. So Alan Johnson, education secretary, and librarians from the School Library Association have given us 167 "top books for boys". The resulting list is a pile of cack - sub-Tolkien and not-really-books - studded here and there with gems.
You have to get to number 14 on the list, as it appears in the Times, before you get any fiction (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams). Then you get a wodge of classics - Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon's Mines, Northern Lights, and Frankenstein.
The last of those shows that someone hasn't got their thinking cap on, for Frankenstein is a dull and confusing work. At least it will familiarise them with 19th-century style - and put them off it forever.
Great Expectations is a much better read - but it's presumably too long for impatient little hands to hold. Treasure Island and Kidnapped are there, but - unbelievably - Robert Louis Stevenson's version has been passed over in favour of a graphic novelisation of the story. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, fine - although the appearance of these last two is presumably down to the fact that they were among Alan Johnson's childhood favourites.
Which might, then, have served as a more useful criterion. Nothing wrong - in fact, everything right - about suggesting books you loved as a child. (Although this can have the opposite effect to the one intended. My mother pressed Huck and Tom on me regularly, with the result that I have yet to read them.) But what useful addition to the mind is gained by reading So You Think You Know the Simpsons? or Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People? Or a Calvin and Hobbes comic book? I wouldn't mind casting an eye over the Simpsons and the C & H while on the bog, but what are they doing here?
It would appear that unless you're a copper-bottomed classic that Johnson once read, your only hope of appearing on the list is if you're about spies or wizards, are a compendium of factoids, or are composed largely of pictures.
OK, that's harsh. But there are plenty of books here that I've never heard of - and one or two that haven't even been published yet. The ones I've never heard of are presumably recent publications that librarians have seized on after boys cited them as being marginally preferable to a poke in the kidneys with a stick.
Some of them may be quite good - but by being there, they've knocked something else off the list. While the quality of the books may be debatable, therefore, their position in anything that might be called a literary canon is not: they're not in it. There's no sense of continuous heritage, of anything timeless, or which might alert these putative boy-readers to the fact that once upon a time, books relied on a good, moving story and weren't packaged with raised lettering on the cover and a picture of weaponry, or dragons.
It makes me wonder: what's so good about reading anyway? And what's so good about forcing an intimidatingly long list on reluctant potential consumers, when so much of it is either garbage or stuff they'd have read anyway? And if they're not inclined to read, so what?
The only book I really want them to read and absorb, now I come to think of it, is the Highway Code, so they don't run me over when they grow up. Better that than - to take an example at random - Here There be Dragons (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica) by James A Owen.
