🅿️ete

I read a lot as a boy, and fancy I still read quite a bit today. The first book I remember obsessing over in lower school was about dinosaurs. I read it several times a week. I progressed to Narnia, Harry Potter, Treasure Island, Artemis Fowl, War of the Worlds, His Dark Materials, Sherlock Holmes, Day of the Triffids, a bunch of Arthur C Clarke, The Hitch Hiker's Guide, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and so on. None of this was on the reading list, which at high school seemed to consist, in the main, of lesbian poets— taught by a woman who was much better at being a lesbian than she was at being a poet. My lower and middle schools also decided - I do not know if they still do this - to make it competitive. Students were assigned a "reading age," and naturally, being a boy, I wanted to trounce the opposition. Jayne Eyre is indeed a masterpiece. Absolutely nothing could have convinced me, then, to give a shit. Nor, frankly, could it now. Boys and girls are different. If you want boys to read, don't give them Jayne Eyre, or any of the interminably solipsistic, introspective guff that makes girls think they're interesting. Boys need fantasy, science fiction, the external over the internal world — and, yes, a bit of "self-actualisation with a weapon". This is better and healthier than self-actualisation at the end of a werewolf's dick, which seems to make up the bulk of women's publishing today. Failing this, boys will continue to find their thrills in videogames, which have not yet been entirely ruined by women.