Do Adult YA Readers Need to Grow Up?
Submitted by bottleofshine on Thu, 2008-03-06 06:11.Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, sparked an interesting discussion on his blog today with some casually derisive remarks about grown-ups who prefer to read children's books and YA novels:
Adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.
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He phrased it really poorly in the blog post, but his comment later on I think nails it:
Roughly 80% of the fiction I read is genre fiction. I like it. I prefer it. But I still dip my toes into other kinds of fiction cause there's some good stuff out there.
A lot of his commenters are right too though. There's an abundance of overly arty pretentious "literary" fiction out there and it's easy to simply avoid it by sticking to young adult fiction. But there is some good stuff to be found if you look for it.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
I think that's the part that makes it so ridiculous to me; he had a good point...eventually. It's lost in what seems like the fields of contempt for a genre he's working to promote (Horn Book editor in chief is not small cookies). Just like other genres, YA fans and writers have to deal with people thinking we're a second-class form of literature, and unfortunately that's the first message anyone is going to see -- that one of the (important!) people in our own community is deriding his own people. Not sure how many people will get far enough down to see him finally make a good point, though. Pretty hurtful way to make a point, too.