The Shaming of Adults who are YA Readers/Fans

[Duncan]

Between the ages of 9 and 15 I lived in the YA section of the library. I also scavenged white elephant sales and used book stores. During this period I read Nine Princes in Amber which is still my favorite book. My fondest memories of books are this period. I still recommend many of the series I read at that time to my nieces. I often go back and re-read the books I have from then. I find that the journey of discovery and rites of passage that are common in YA fiction are some of the most enjoyable themes to read. They are stories that resonate to readers of all ages.

Since I use an e-reader nowadays I avoid all embarrassment since it is very hard to tell what I am reading. In general the only times I have been embarrassed is when the book I am reading has a bodice ripper cover. And that didn't stop me from reading it on public transit either.

 

[JoanDrake]

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.

Oh, yes. Most all adult fiction I've read.

One story in the New Yorker ended with the protagonist, for no discernable reason whatsoever, tearing a page out of a book. I promptly proceeded to follow his example with the entire magazine, though it didn't help

 

[Mark Ragland]

I'm glad this topic is mentioned.

My reading taste in fiction is very eclectic. I read everything from fantasy, to SF, to thrillers. And yes, occasionally I read books that are labeled YA. The Hunger Games trilogy is an example of YA books that I've read. I've also read the first 2 books of the Harry Potter series.

To me, a good book is a good book. It doesn't matter if it's an adult book, a children's book, or a YA book.

 

[VKALFIERI]

Most of YA is as good as if not better than its mature content counterparts.

I read what I think sounds interesting.

If book snobs want to shame me for it; that's their issue, not mine.

 

[pambaddeley]

Frances Hardinge has just won the Costa prize, the first children's/YA book to win the 'adult' version of the prize since Philip Pullman won it in 2001 - Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree wins Costa book of the year 2015
Another one for my to-read pile!

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Frances Hardinge has just won the Costa prize, the first children's/YA book to win the 'adult' version of the prize since Philip Pullman won it in 2001 - Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree wins Costa book of the year 2015
Another one for my to-read pile!

It's good.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The review (very intriguing) you wrote for the Hardinge book on your blog tempts me greatly, Stephen.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

The review (very intriguing) you wrote for the Hardinge book on your blog tempts me greatly, Stephen.

Give it a try. I think you'd like it. Faith is a great character to follow through the story.

 

[2DaveWixon]

I love YA. ...

I read what I want.

Amen! I had to learn that back when I was in high school, when I found myself apparently the only person in the county who read science fiction... I took a lot of grief for that, but after a while I grew mental scar tissue, and was able to decide that I knew better than those who derided me...

I'm better for it.

Dave Wixon

 

[2DaveWixon]

When I was a young lad (age about 10 thru 13), I read some of the Winston SF novels for young readers. My basic memory of them at this point, 60 some years later, is that I very much enjoyed them. Specific details have been lacking in my brain.

Hope I'm marginally on topic.

The Winston series will live in my memory as long as my brain lives...the end-papers alone raised them to a class above all other YA sf...and as a bonus, many of the books were good!
Dave Wixon

 

[MWagner]

The funny thing is that there's no need to feel defensive about liking YA stories and fantasy stories general. They've gone mainstream. Young adult culture is pop culture in 2016. Look at the top movies at the box office. The bestselling novels. If your entertainment product doesn't appeal to 15 year olds, you're dead in the water commercially.

Maybe that's why the literati are digging in so stubbornly. They've lost. The Booker and National Book Award have no profile in pop culture. The only people who care about serious literary ambitions are a sub-culture of academics and sympathetic journalists.

Having said all that, I can't say I'm entirely comfortable with a cultural world where anything that doesn't appeal to 15 year olds has little chance of achieving popularity. A world where most people have the same tastes at 45 that they had at 15. It suggests a kind of stagnation, or turning away from adult concerns. Yes, the struggles of young people becoming adults have universal and potent appeal. But where is the rest of life? Where are the stories depicting the struggles of parenthood?* The hard-won wisdom of middle age? Are these phases of life so dismaying that we turn away from them in our maturity, and return again and again to the stories of our adolescence - the superheroes and questing princes and love-torn young women?

Maybe we should cut these literary types some slack. For all their snobbish contempt for genre (which is really just a defense mechanism of those who can't make any money), their ambitions are admirable. Shouldn't there be a place in culture for serious examinations of the human condition? For stories that young minds cannot yet grasp and understand?

* In all the brouhaha about diversity in fiction, one group that is astonishingly under-represented is mothers. I've seen people praise TV shows and books that feature single young men and women of every racial and sexual identity as paragons of diversity. When not a single character is over 30 or has children. It's downright comical.

 

[Toby Frost]

Very good points. Firstly, YA has won and won hands down. Who, apart from a few elitists and the inevitable lunatics who exist only on the internet like evil spirits in a William Gibson book, actually puts up a determined fight against it? Maybe every so often a broadsheet pays somebody to stir up trouble and get its website some clicks. That’s about it, I suspect.

Secondly, there is a very strong point to be made that, if most big-sellers in SFF end up being about people under 30 (or 20), a huge part of human existence is just ignored. We mock the 80s fantasy novels, with their clichéd farmboy heroes discovering the world and that they are its chosen one, but is that what people want? Perhaps so, in a slightly more developed form. There’s nothing inherently wrong with escapism, but perhaps we run the risk of ending up with a sort of Victorian world-view, where all stories end with marriage.

I have recently written a book – still seeking a publisher – in which two characters were a (young) teenage girl and an old man. It occurred to me very quickly that there was a huge swathe of teenage experience that felt not just uninteresting but irrelevant to me (although probably of burning importance when you’re 15): the need to rebel, the mood swings, and of course the eternal struggle between Good Boy and Bad Boy for the heroine’s affections. I ended up deciding that since my character was a peasant stuck in a castle in the middle of nowhere, and the book was for adults, I’d just ignore all that stuff and get on with the wyvern-riding. On the other hand, the old man was a fascinating character to write: a good man who has got left behind, and whose resentment of change has made him angry and bigoted.

The suspicion I have is that the complexities of getting older aren’t interesting to the young and are too hard and not escapist enough to be worth writing. I’d be interested to read a fantasy novel about a mother. How about a Joan of Arc type who settles down and has kids? I suspect a book like that could have been reasonably successful in the late 1980s – coincidentally, the time when Ripley and Sarah Connor were ruling SF.

(Further points for using “brouhaha”, by the way. I haven’t ever heard it used outside Tom Lehrer records.)

 

[AnyaKimlin]

The funny thing is that there's no need to feel defensive about liking YA stories and fantasy stories general. They've gone mainstream. Young adult culture is pop culture in 2016. Look at the top movies at the box office. The bestselling novels. If your entertainment product doesn't appeal to 15 year olds, you're dead in the water commercially.

I think that is a mistake on the publishers part. When I was part of the BBC forum I became frustrated that my work had to be constantly aimed at a younger market. The funny thing was the work I wrote for 18-25 market got great feedback from the younger testers - they particularly liked the fact it wasn't based on social media well I did do Mhairi Black responding to emails and something on Bronies but the focus wasn't on the social media it was a tool. The comedy I used for both pieces was very traditional. The traditional comedy where I was aiming for Victoria Wood or Morecambe and Wise got edited out of most of my work by the BBC but the 18-25 readers liked that aspect of the pieces they read and commented on.

I've discovered my current story with a 68 year old protagonist is appealing to my YA aged readers of Mayhem simply because the main character is an older gay man whose been in a relationship for nearly 50 years (more on and off). Apparently that's fascinating. Plus in the UK the 55+ market is the wealthiest in the UK they're the ones with the disposable income. It's a market that's being largely ignored. When it comes to comedy the UK seems to be after Friends whereas most people who stay at home watching TV prefer Dad's Army.

What I am finding is that I was in the middle of the age range for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and actually that generation like having a character that is a bit older than themselves these days. And my writers group that didn't like urban fantasy do like urban fantasy when the character is 68 I had mothballed the book for that reason but I'm not finding any readers it's putting off and it has "sold" the book to readers that wouldn't have read Mayhem with a 17 year old MC.

 

[aThenian]

* In all the brouhaha about diversity in fiction, one group that is astonishingly under-represented is mothers.

So true.

I’d be interested to read a fantasy novel about a mother.

One of the (many) things I love about Grass by Sheri S Tepper is the protagonist - a gutsy, middle aged mother. And that's not incidental to her character - issues around procreation, contraception etc are important to the book (as with many of Tepper's books). I'd really recommend it.

(Thinking about it, I guess Grass is actually sci-fi rather than fantasy, but there's quite a fantasy feel.)

 

[pambaddeley]

I think that is a mistake on the publishers part. When I was part of the BBC forum I became frustrated that my work had to be constantly aimed at a younger market. The funny thing was the work I wrote for 18-25 market got great feedback from the younger testers - they particularly liked the fact it wasn't based on social media well I did do Mhairi Black responding to emails and something on Bronies but the focus wasn't on the social media it was a tool. The comedy I used for both pieces was very traditional. The traditional comedy where I was aiming for Victoria Wood or Morecambe and Wise got edited out of most of my work by the BBC but the 18-25 readers liked that aspect of the pieces they read and commented on.

I've discovered my current story with a 68 year old protagonist is appealing to my YA aged readers of Mayhem simply because the main character is an older gay man whose been in a relationship for nearly 50 years (more on and off). Apparently that's fascinating. Plus in the UK the 55+ market is the wealthiest in the UK they're the ones with the disposable income. It's a market that's being largely ignored. When it comes to comedy the UK seems to be after Friends whereas most people who stay at home watching TV prefer Dad's Army.

What I am finding is that I was in the middle of the age range for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and actually that generation like having a character that is a bit older than themselves these days. And my writers group that didn't like urban fantasy do like urban fantasy when the character is 68 I had mothballed the book for that reason but I'm not finding any readers it's putting off and it has "sold" the book to readers that wouldn't have read Mayhem with a 17 year old MC.

That's very interesting. It may be another of these self fulfiling prophecies where publishers and film makers/broadcasters chase after what they perceive to be the YA market and get it horribly wrong. It's similar to how they behaved in the 80s - 90s or so with historical fiction, where readers of that could only get reissues from the library of Jean Plaidy, Dorothea Dunnett etc as the publishers deemed there was 'no market' for the genre. It was only the popularity of Cadfael especially the TV series and 'Name of the Rose' that between them started a new subgenre of medieval murder mystery with a lot of immitators, but publishers eventually got the message and now we have doorstop books from the likes of Ken Follett (who started with spy thrillers but switched to historicals in 1989 - possibly if he had not already been a best selling author, he would have had a lot more problems publishing his first historical blockbuster).

It's more disturbing than the historical genre fiasco, because more pervasive, that the received wisdom now is that everything needs to be made for 15 year olds and be all flash/bash action and great SFX but no proper plot or characterisation. The recent screening on TV of Ridley Scott's 2012 'prequel' to 'Alien', 'Prometheus', followed by the original film was instructive - despite the impressive SFX, the newer film seemed muddled and for me had cardboard characters whereas 'Alien' takes the time to build up the crew as real people, grousing and kidding around with each other, moaning about bonuses etc - plus they seem to have a higher average age than the people in 'Prometheus'.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

It's more disturbing than the historical genre fiasco, because more pervasive, that the received wisdom now is that everything needs to be made for 15 year olds and be all flash/bash action and great SFX but no proper plot or characterisation. The recent screening on TV of Ridley Scott's 2012 'prequel' to 'Alien', 'Prometheus', followed by the original film was instructive - despite the impressive SFX, the newer film seemed muddled and for me had cardboard characters whereas 'Alien' takes the time to build up the crew as real people, grousing and kidding around with each other, moaning about bonuses etc - plus they seem to have a higher average age than the people in 'Prometheus'.

I don't know about movies but I did find with my comedy I was increasingly cutting things that built character and it increasingly made the story difficult to follow and get into. I think modern sit-coms suffer from that. It used to be we accepted the first episode was the introduction and a little clunky but then it would get better and I think a good sit-com has to have that clunky first episode.

I've faced the dilemma with my current book because it takes six chapters to get to the murder/kidnap. However there is action and when I went to cut those chapters I've realised if I do the story loses a huge chunk that it really needs to make it work. Silly things like mention of a painting that starts the search when my MC picks up a ring - it also introduces the child that goes missing. After the event I can't really bring him in the same.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

-Asimov (hallowed be his name) wrote that good YA SF shouldn't be much different from adult SF - mainly in that it should define uncommon words when they are first used. This may not apply in other genres, but in SF I think he had the right idea. One needs to remember that kids that read for fun are smarter than average, and, tell the truth and shame the Devil, kids that read SF are generally smarter still.

-In the best examples even (or perhaps especially) stories aimed at parents reading to young children contain elements that amuse the adults and go right by the kids. In the case of YA, that same practice is easier. It makes for books that brighter kids will get more out of than other kids, but that all can still enjoy. And for books that might be re-read later, with the pleasant experience of seeing things that weren't caught the 1st time. Seems like win/win to me.

-In terms of its effect on society, YA SF is extremely important - so it behooves adults who give a darn or 2, to keep an eye on it. Cory Doctorow has the right idea. Again, I don't think that applies so much to other genres of YA, but then I'm a genre snob.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Amen! I had to learn that back when I was in high school, when I found myself apparently the only person in the county who read science fiction... I took a lot of grief for that, but after a while I grew mental scar tissue, and was able to decide that I knew better than those who derided me...

I'm better for it.

Dave Wixon

I feel a need to clarify something: in the above quote, I was not referring to YA as a category in any way; it was science fiction, of any form, that no one but myself wanted to read...

 

[Kieran Song]

Lol, read what you love...that's my motto. I too enjoy YA for quick reads that are entertaining.

 

[Judderman]

In a world of mobile phones, text speak, twitter, snapchat, reactionary headlines and celebrity soundbites it is no surprise that a lot of people are more comfortable with young adult novels rather than novels with more complex vocabulary. In what for some are fast paced lives YA novels may also be more relaxing. But it is better than having people not reading books at all, and there will always be authors writing more complex stories and scripts. It is just that the percentage of them having success has declined.

For young characters surely most people want their reading to include some excitement and adventure or drama. That tends to come from young people in real life and also fiction.