Book Shaming

So, someone on Slate named Ruth Graham tried to shame adults for reading YA novels. It's editorials like that that make me think Slate is overrated. I tried to read the article, but it goes on and on, mostly about "The Fault in Our Stars," book and movie. There was too much about the story than I wanted to know -- I don't like spoilers -- and because the author was irritating me. How dare someone tell anyone what they should be ashamed of. Well, if someone was telling someone he or she should be ashamed of mugging old people, or otherwise doing nasty things to others, yeah, that's fine. But to try to shame people over their choice of reading material? In the word of a native New Yorker: Fuhgeddaboutit.

I left a comment on the io9.com article about it that was written in opposition to the Slate editorial. I said:

"I was a YA librarian for 8 years. And for those 8 years, part of my job was to read and review and booktalk books geared toward a teen audience. Some of my favorite books are among those YA novels. 

It's not just a marketing term. It's also irrelevant. People should read what they want to read. It doesn't matter what age level the books are written for or marketed to. The Harry Potter series is a children's series, yet people from 6 or 7 to 100 or so read them. Superhero comics have traditionally been marketed to boys but that didn't stop me from reading them, starting in 1960. I read adult books when I was a kid, adult and kid books in my teens, and as an adult, I read every age level book I want. One of the best books I've ever read was a children's book: Holes by Louis Sachar. I read it as a middle-aged adult. Other than authors and publishers wanting people to read their books, no one should care what other people are reading. As a retired librarian, I'm just happy people are reading." 

I really was bothered by the author of the article defending adults reading YA novels by calling YA lit a marketing term. Which it is, of course, along with genre labels and even the decision to dispense with genre labels when they think an author can break out to a wider audience. But YA novels are written in a certain way. They focus on teen characters, with strong pov that keeps the focus on the particular issues teens deal with, like puberty and acceptance, even while dealing with the larger realm they live in. Sometimes, it's the conflict of trying to be an adult as their realm requires vs their struggle to mature, deal with hormones, and so on. You'd be more likely to find adults eager to read about characters ranging from childhood to old age. Teens are more likely to want to read about characters their age and a few years older. It's the rare YA novel that would be focused on an 80-year-old. Or an 8-year-old.

YA novels tend to not have digressions into rhetoric or authorial editorializing. And since they cover readers from 12 through 19, they vary in their vocabulary. They also don't feel the need to toss in an obligatory sex scene, though they might cover sexual experiences. I'd say they tend to be shorter than adult literature, but there are so many exceptions these days, starting with the Harry Potter books, which were written for children, covering a lot of YA fantasy and science fiction. One reason I love YA fiction is how, when good, it tends to get to the heart of a story and not meander. Character development tends to be strong and the writing clear.

Bottom line: read what you want. And don't let anyone make you feel bad about it.

For Young Adults

Otherwise known as Teens. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal decrying the state of YA fiction had the literary internet all abuzz this past week. Tor has a good overview. I was a YA librarian for 8 years, back in the '80s, and believe me, YA lit wasn't exactly pristine and upbeat even then. And that was fine! Because the books were what kids wanted to read. What's published now is what kids want to read. And on average, teens are a lot wiser and resilient than some people want to give them credit for.

Of course, there are exceptions. Lots of them. And parents usually, or should, know their child and what they can handle. Age and maturity factor in, but so does whether or not a parent is trying to protect their kid from life's harsh realities so much so that when the kid grows up and is smacked by harsh reality, he or she isn't prepared to handle life's disappointments.

When I was in my teens, in the '60s, the division was mostly between books for children and books for adults, with some exceptions. In the first half of the '60s, we had book clubs where we could, as a class, buy pbs written for our age level. We had Arrow Books for the first 3 grades and from grade 4-6, we had Tab Books. I think Scholastic published them. They were pretty tame. I read a few. But mostly, I read library books and what my parents owned. And comic books. Lots of comic books.

I was pretty heavily into Nancy Drew, The Dana Girls, and Trixie Belden. For Nancy and the Danas, it wasn't the later, sanitized versions, but the originals that were hand-me-downs from my mother's friends and then later titles published in the '50s and early '60s, when Nancy routinely got chloroformed/knocked out. Back then, that was pretty dark. I loved it!

I aged out of books for kids when I was 10 or so. While I still read Nancy Drew and other kid books (Little House books, especially), I also started reading Agatha Christie and such titles as: The Martian Chronicles, Rebecca, and Sherlock Holmes (too boring for me), among others. I was blessed with parents who knew I was reading 3-4 grades above my grade level and who didn't care what I was reading as long as I was reading. Which is why, when I asked, my mother agreed that I could read the James Bond books my parents owned. I was 11 at the time. Those books got me into my late teens, but Doctor No, which I read when I was 11, is still my favorite.

The best way to grow a reader, in my opinion, is to get them excited by the written word. Readers typically want to be entertained, to be thrilled, to laugh or cry by what they read. If reading about vampires (not my favorite topic), then let them read about vampires. Would I give the Twilight books to a 10-year-old kid? Probably not, unless that kid is exceptional. But I'd have no qualms with the average 14 or 15-year-old reading them. Having recently read the Hunger Games trilogy, I can't think of a single thing in them that would not be appropriate for the average teen. But then, it's an imagined future.

To be honest, I've been away from YA work for many years now, so I'm not as in tune with what's out there now, but reading The Hunger Games reminded me how much I love good YA fiction. At its best, it's a clean form of writing, getting right to the heart of things, without burying the characters and themes under a barrage of poetic prose. YA fiction has always been about a good story and in trying to not be art, it becomes art just the same.