How can we help children to understand that it isn't the thickness of the book that's important but how exciting and thought provoking it is?
Teacher, year 5
This is surely an extension of the old adage "you can't judge a book by its cover", which now seems confusing as any schoolchild will tell you that one of the ways of deciding what to read next is to look at the cover. That's when they are not telling you that the blurb is also a useful way of learning more about the book since both of these pieces of information seem to be well-embedded in current literacy teaching.
The ideal is to find exactly the right book to satisfy each particular reader but, failing that, it would be worth picking out successful short and long books to make the point that they can be equally exciting.
The size of a book can certainly affect how readers of any age approach it. Subconsciously, you have to weigh up how much time it will take to enjoy it all. Children can be put off by books that look too long. Equally, they sometimes turn away from books that are short or books that have pictures in them in case anyone should mistake theme for being less good readers than they really are.
Interestingly, the two most successful children's authors of the last 25 years – Roald Dahl and JK Rowling – wrote in contrasting lengths. Typically, Dahl is brief. Although Danny, the Champion of the World and Matilda are approximately 40,000 words each, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Twits are considerably shorter. And all are very short compared to the seven Harry Potter novels. At more than 75,000 words, when Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was first published, it raised expectations of what children could – and quickly did - enjoy reading.
Such was its success and influence that, since then, children's books have just got longer. And there seems to be no stopping them. For some readers, that may be a great attraction; for others it is a turn off. Anthony Horowitz's most recent title, Oblivion, is 672 pages. Although it was "page turning" throughout, that is a lot of pages to turn. The House of Secrets by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini, one of the biggest launches of 2013, is 560 pages and Charlie Higson's gripping and bloody The Enemy and its sequels are around 450 pages each. More manageable, at 336 pages, is Eoin Colfer's latest book WARP: The Reluctant Assassin, a highly readable steampunk, time-travelling adventure.
For the less able reader, any of these will be a daunting prospect and you may have to lure them into the story with a bit of judicious reading aloud to show how much excitement there is – despite the length. Once they are gripped by a story, the length will matter little.
