Desperate to make young boys turn off their PlayStations and DVD players and just READ something — anything! — publishers are apparently turning to a gross new sort of pulp fiction, shamelessly pandering to boys' supposed taste for the gory and disgusting. And it's working! After more than a few breakout hits, publishers ramped up production to 261 boys' books last year, more than double the amount in 2003, according to a front-page Wall Street Journal article. The real fun in the Journal piece, if you aren't around kids much, is just reading through the titles of what boys are reading these days. Like, for example, "Help! What's Eating My Flesh: Runaway Staph and Strep Infections!," which helped push Scholastic's science and history series to 300,000 copies in print.

There's also Penguin Group's "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger," which pushed the boundaries of the genre and is now in its second printing.

And there's so much more! Let's just have a list:

  • It's Disgusting and We Ate It! True Food Facts from Around the World and Throughout History (Simon & Schuster)
  • The "Butt" triology, which includes "The Day My Butt Went Psycho.... the epic tale of a brave young boy and his crazy runaway butt," is up to 1.2 million copies. (Scholastic)
  • Getting to Know Your Toilet: The Disgusting Story Behind Your Home's Strangest Feature (Capstone Press)
  • Wicked History: Leopold II: Butcher of the Congo (Scholastic)
  • Wicked History: Mary Tudor: Courageous Queen or Bloody Mary? (Scholastic)
  • The "Captain Underpants" series, Scholastic, 37 million copies in print.
  • Oh, Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty (Workman Publishing)

Sure, this might seem like a corruption of children's reading, the youth equivalent of a celebrity magazine or (*cough*) gossip blog. But it's actually a good thing that kids are encouraged to look at reading as entertainment and useful information rather than as homework. Better they think of books that way than as esoteric, rarefied or snobbish. The boys with aptitude for more advanced material will surely demand it.

To those who would argue otherwise, well... FART! Bwahahahahahaaaa....

[WSJ]