The Shaming of Adults who are YA Readers/Fans

The Bluestocking

The Bluestocking

Bloody Mary in Blue
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Some of you might have come across this inflammatory article:

Against YA in Slate e-zine.

What do you think?

/Tiny rant begins/

As a grown woman - with a degree in English Literature - who is on a YA reading streak and who finds that there are bunches upon bunches of great stories happening in YA books*, and as someone who tutors children to help them improve their English, I find that writer's opinion absolute anathema because a great story is a great story, no matter what age the story is purportedly written for. I'd rather read some beautifully written and engagingly plotted YA instead of some overrated literary stuff or badly written potboilers for adults.

/Tiny rant ends/

*I'm not going to call it a "genre", neither am I going to call the article "genre shaming" as some do because YA spans a wide range of genres and is more like a age-appropriate rating akin to G or PG-13 for movies.
 
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Bluestocking, we cross paths again. Has your hatred of The Mayor of Casterbridge led you to this?

Anyway, it's a silly article. People read what interests them. If adults who enjoy YA novels were somehow shamed out of reading them, chances are they would read nothing.

It might have been different once. I think there was a time when people made their reading choices with the aim of self-improvement, to challenge themselves. Maybe some still do. Actually, I think that's an admirable pursuit, but it's not one I follow myself -- I read what interests me, not because i think I'll expand my horizons (though I often do, if only incidentally). But people should be allowed to want to just enjoy a fast-paced rollercoaster story, and this is what YA tends to deliver.
 
I love reading YA fiction, and I also really enjoy MG (for 8-12 year olds). I'm fairly well educated and I've read other things too, and I can't help feeling it seems like a strange rule that anyone older than 18 can't read fiction that is marketed at children.

I saw Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman speak last year, and they both said that they wrote what they wanted and then agents/ editors etc. told them what category it fell into. I want to read stories like the ones Garth Nix writes, and I want to read other stories too.

A lot of adult genre fiction right now, in my limited and cowardly experience, is obsessed with ugly death (in the case of "grimdark") and sex. I generally prefer stories without too much sex (although there are exceptions -- I liked the Stacia Kane books), and lots and lots of death and misery is a direct turn off -- I do not want to read that stuff. I don't care if other people read it, but I can't stand it.

In general, you get less of it in YA. I do wonder if the boom in YA fiction may be partly driving Adult literature to be more extremely "adult".
 
HareBrain said:
Bluestocking, we cross paths again. Has your hatred of The Mayor of Casterbridge led you to this?
Click to expand...

Actually, no. I do still enjoy re-reading Jane Austen, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and a whole host of classics. It's easy enough to dodge Thomas Hardy even if one only reads literary stuff. :D
 
Hex said:
A lot of adult genre fiction right now, in my limited and cowardly experience, is obsessed with ugly death (in the case of "grimdark") and sex. I generally prefer stories without too much sex (although there are exceptions -- I liked the Stacia Kane books), and lots and lots of death and misery is a direct turn off -- I do not want to read that stuff. I don't care if other people read it, but I can't stand it.
Click to expand...

As I remarked on another thread - maybe we should start a "grand old literary tradition" called "... and then they all died. The end."

Seriously though - I've been avoiding the Grimdark stuff and anything with tons of sex scenes (sex scenes are fine when situated judiciously in a story but when they are liberally peppered all over, they become sexposition, and therefore gratuitous IMHO)... and reading YA is one way of doing it.

Life is stressful enough without opening one's evening reading only to have misery, violence, and hopelessness spattered all across one's barely-conscious mind.
 
I see so much mention of The Fault in Our Stars in that article that I'm minded to think that it's a guerilla promotion for it - even though it's already a successful novel. No mention of Harry Potter or Hunger Games?
 
In defence of modern fantasy - I'm reading Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series and thoroughly enjoying it. Fast paced, not too gory, good characters (mc is poc, which is great to see), great fun. Ocean at the End of the Lane was fab, too. So not everything's grim dark, only one genre.

Anyway, I like a bit of Ya. Not all the time but enough to say the article's tosh. :)
 
I think the article dismissed fantasy/ science fiction along with Twilight and Divergent as unworthy of serious consideration, which perhaps brings us neatly back to Jon's comment.

I think I have the Aaronovitch books -- my sister lent them to me -- so I'll read them soon. I'll read the Gaiman because I always do, however they're marketed (though one of my favourites was The Graveyard Book and I also really enjoyed Fortunately, the Milk).
 
I stopped reading at 'Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children'. No one tells me what I should feel embarrassed about. I read ‘Goosebumps: The Cuckoo Clock of Doom’ the other day and regardless of it being a childish story, I have no shame in saying that I enjoyed reading it.

I don’t think that YA books are necessarily written only for teens. Nor do I think that children’s books are written only for children. For me, the perfect definition of a YA, MG or Children’s book is one that is enjoyable for adults, yet appropriate for those of a younger age.
 
I would have to agree that since the focus of this article is The Fault in Our Stars that the article is written around the notion that what is current is good for the blog or the reader interest in whichever webzine or periodical she is targeting.

Also this author's personal blog has gotten down to updating once every year and the in last blog posted she admitted that she hadn't blogged much or at all in the last year.

She's a journalist and freelances so her bread and butter are in writing articles such as this, but I'm a bit appalled at the apparent lack of research. -Then again; she might have to read some YA fiction to find out if it all meets her criteria.

Her sweeping statement almost sounds like she believes all YA authors talk down to the young adults and sugar coat the plot. It seems to come from a place that says that we mandated so much for control of what the young adults are allowed to read that we should know that its not fit for consumption for adults.

The only agreeable observation I saw was a moment touching on the lack of any demonstration of the consequences of certain moral decisions- because of the sugar coating. But in the case of this article the argument doesn't hold well because it comes off the premise that YA fiction is something that it is not.

The lament seems to be mostly against those that become popular and are made into movies. The notion is that it must be because more than just the YA are making them popular. The rest becomes moot point because if I understand the author's position it would be a disaster for her to read these because she's an adult now and so I would have to assume that she's not read the books she bashing.

Although technically she's bashing the adults who read them and the maligning of fiction is collateral damage.
 
I love YA. I always list Garth Nix, Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman along with my favourite authors.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is one of the best books I've read for a very long time.

Blood, guts and sex don't bother me. What I don't like about (some) adult books is that they spend ages waffling on about nothing. I put a book down a little while ago because I'd read pages and pages and suddenly realised I hadn't a clue what the plot was because nobody seemed to be actually doing anything.

I read what I want.
 
The person who wrote the article does appear to be a troll, and an advertising-spammer, if the two can be considered to be different things.

She seems most concerned with the "replacing of literary fiction" in adult reading lists, though I believe the book she purports to be bothering herself with is also pretty literary as fiction goes.

I have actually been intending to read the book, since I started seeing the movie promos, and now I shall do so purely out of spite instead of the true interest I had before.

I read lots of YA and MG books -- always have, always will. I read lots of other things, too. So what?
 
I read the first couple of pages in a bookshop and the voice and humour were wonderful. I wasn't sure I could deal with the subject matter so I put the book down. I am meaning to read it sometime, though.
 
Hex said:
I love reading YA fiction, and I also really enjoy MG (for 8-12 year olds). I'm fairly well educated and I've read other things too, and I can't help feeling it seems like a strange rule that anyone older than 18 can't read fiction that is marketed at children.

.
Click to expand...

This. If it is a good book it is a good book. I read Jane Eyre at seven, The Clockwork Orange at nine etc And I still love the Hardy Boys.

Spy Dog is an amazing book. My children and I all laughed and cried our way through it. My then three, five and eight year olds sat entranced for two full hours as I read it to them.

Right now we are reading Trusted by Krista Wayment and my daughter is entranced. We could not even entice her away with chocolate cake. We are reading Michael Morpurgo's Private Peaceful next.
 
I think this woman is critting the one book "The Fault in Our Stars" as if it's the whole YA genre. She's a bit behind the times there. "Fault" is a throwback to the way YA was written in the late 6o's and 70's, specifically, it's the "Love Story" of our day and if you're familiar with that diabetic piece of schmaltz you can't help but agree with the woman that adults should definitely not be reading it for any kind of edification, be they young or otherwise.


As far as I'm concerned the most successful YA book out right now is Game of Thrones. Martin throws in lots and lots of sex and violence has the characters act as fallible and ambiguous adults then lets the stories go where they will. If people die and existence seems meaningless, that's life, but if it has sentences mostly under 12 words and an eighth grade vocabulary, that's also YA.
 
Children, children. This is YA! If guts are necessary, they should be tastefully presented (like bunting) and have obvious relevance to the plot. Likewise sex. Likewise sex with gutsy rodents. Or whatever you're talking about.

(because, obviously, I have NO IDEA AT ALL. None).

----

A lot of YA is kind of benign and hopeful. I like that about it.
 
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