On Saturday, I gave a talk on ‘teenage boys and reading’ to the rather lovely people at the CILIP School Libraries Group Conference. My contention was that boys often want different things from their reading matter than girls, and if this is indeed the case that it’s part of my job as an author to try and understand what it is they want so I can create stories that will appeal to them.

I don’t write boys’ books and I don’t write girls’ books. I write books. But I do write books that I would have enjoyed reading when I was a teenager, and I happened to be a boy. That’s not to say girls won’t enjoy my stories – I have many female fans – or that boys don’t enjoy books written by women (or that feature a female protagonist), but to try and suggest that there is a one-size-fits-all way to publish and market books that will have universal appeal is ridiculous. If a book has a cover that shows a tank rolling across a field of human skulls, there is no reason why a girl shouldn’t pick it off the shelf and enjoy it, but I believe this girl would be in a minority. Is the fact that the book is jacketed in such a way wrong? Of course not. The jacket should reflect the story, and if the skull crushing military hardware does that, why not use it?

In the lead up to giving my talk I became very aware that there has been a good deal of discussion about gender reading, and that the subject generates some very strong feelings on both sides of the argument. Now I’m not for one moment suggesting that the availability of ‘The Bumper Book of Boy Adventure Stories’ or ‘The Girls’ Compendium of Fairy Stories’ is at all desirable, but at a time when it’s recognised that boys don’t read for pleasure as much as girls, surely we have to accept that any clever marketing that might address this unwillingness to engage with fiction can only be a good thing.

Last September, on the Book Riot website, this discussion engendered some forthright comments from both sides, so I thought my presentation might cause me some problems. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the majority of the audience agreed with me. Despite the fact that I ‘lost’ three entire slides from my Powerpoint presentation, resulting in me getting a bit flustered and truncating my talk by about ten minutes, the librarians seemed to enjoy what I had to say. One school librarian came up to me afterwards and said: “Thank God somebody has the guts to point this stuff out. There is far too much pandering to the PC brigade, and trying to pretend that boys and girls are the same and want to read the same stuff. Good for you.” I wasn’t there to make a political point, but I got the distinct impression this was a subject that many of my audience had been kicking around for some time.

So what is it that boys want from books? Clearly, much of the stuff will be the same as what girls want. But too much YA fiction seems to focus on angst and inner turmoil (as if teenagers haven’t got enough of that to contend with already!) What’s wrong with action and adventure stories that don’t have a complex, heart-wringing love triangle at the centre of them? What’s wrong with the quest for power, and the realisation that power corrupts even the strongest among us? What’s wrong with having female protagonists who has clear and difficult goals, and who doesn’t need a boy or anyone else to help her achieve those goals? Any hey, what’s wrong with a tank rolling across a field of human skulls?

Nothing is wrong with them.

Gendered reading isn’t a bad thing in itself. To suggest all books will have an equal appeal to both sexes is naïve, and does nothing to address the different needs of some boys and some girls when it comes to reading matter. Get young people to read what they want, not what we want them to. If that’s action adventure stories with gun-wielding assassins, or if it’s a heart-rending tale of unfulfilled love, so be it. Being different isn’t bad. Trying to make everybody the same is.