Yet another defamatory article on YA

Couldn't even read the whole article without getting so annoyed that I had to give up. Grrr!

"So why are the young adult shelves in bookshops and the noticeboards in school libraries crammed full of invitations to read books spluttering and gagging on the foul-tasting medicine of their own good intentions?"

....PLEASE. There are TONS of amazing YA books and authors that don't churn out bullshit (sorry). EVERY genre has crap on the shelves, not just YA.

I'm steaming.

Even setting aside the fact that I disagree with the author, this article is poorly argued at best. His argument against YA fiction is vague and not especially cohesive, which made it difficult to get through.

There is terrible YA out there, but there has been a lot of excellent work done in the genre as well, same as any other genre.

Oh, and this popped out to me.

"It features a transgender school dropout with autism... and the protagonist’s mother makes a living selling legal highs to illegal immigrants.

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It's odd--and more than a little sad--that the author felt compelled to open his piece by taking cheap shots at diversity and, presumably, social views he disagrees with, especially when those things don't appear to have anything to do with his argument in the rest of the piece.

It's clickbait. There have been several similar articles over the years...I don't even bother looking at them any more (why dignify the site they're on with a visit?)

That said, it's reeeeallllly annoying clickbait...

A brief look through the author, Joe Nutt's, FB page and his books on Amazon, in my opinion he's one of those literary snobs, a get-off-my-lawn dinosaur who doesn't adapt well to change.

He needs to read more broadly than the classics.

Right. When I was a teen, my friends and I used to read books from La Bibliotheque Verte, which I'd say would fit in with late MG / early YA nowadays. My favourite series: Alice (MC=18) and Les Conquerants de l'Impossible (also 18, I think). Great books, a lot of which I remember fondly and would be happy to read again. In fact my mum enjoyed Alice a lot, too. It didn't stop me from reading adult novels at the same time.

And guess what? I can still read, and I read extensively, and most of my friends do, too. Heck, a lot of us have studied literature. Despite having read YA novels. Shocking.

The link will take you to a Wikipedia article in French. Sorry about that. The interesting bit? The date this collection, La Bibliotheque Verte, was created. 1923.
YA's nothing new.

He's not really concerned about YA; he's concerned about books that aren't by and for white middle-aged straight men.

I've never read any editorials on YA lit that's worth reading. From the looks of them, the extent of the editorialist's research involves going to the nearest Barnes and Noble, scanning the contents of the YA shelf for five minutes, then writing about the insights gathered. You expect him/her to do something silly like read a few YA books published in the last ten years or :gasp: talk to fans of the genre or anyone currently working in the field? They simply can't. They've got a busy schedule of churning out bland generalizations. They're simply swamped. A bingo card for those interested: https://i.embed.ly/1/display/resize...ttp://pbs.twimg.com/media/B89Id6DIcAAwGfH.png

MaeZe said:

A brief look through the author, Joe Nutt's, FB page and his books on Amazon, in my opinion he's one of those literary snobs, a get-off-my-lawn dinosaur who doesn't adapt well to change.

He needs to read more broadly than the classics.

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Hell, if he just read the canon carefully, it would be a start. His books on people like Donne are kinda stupid. Yes, they're meant for undergraduates, but they're not books I'd recommend. They're sort of like pricey Monarch Notes.

There's a lot of room for careful reading of the canon; it's not an accident that Donne wrote thoughtfully about same-sex desire and suicide, or that Milton was passionately opposed to slavery, and in favor of the freedom of the press and divorce.

For an awesome reply, I love this piece by YA author Sarah Nicolas, which appeared on the YAtopia blog yesterday. When YA writers have those contracts from cereal companies, we WILL have the last laugh, lol!

Honestly this is….really, really one of the dumbest anti-YA articles I've ever read. SO insultingly stupid. There's not one textual reference in the whole thing! As far as I can tell, the main thrust of this unspeakably stupid article is - there wasn't any YA around when *I* was young, therefore it must be a bad thing? Or what…paying attention to the needs & insecurities of young adults is unspeakably dumb because it enables them to focus on them? To consider that their own viewpoints might be relevant or important, that that might be in fact be the lens through which teenagers view the adult world?

Even worse, I think this article has a good point. There is very little highly marketable nonfiction for a teen reader, or indeed, even older MG. But no doubt Joe Nutt thinks "marketable" is a dirty word, too? Because reading shouldn't be relevant, or sexy, or anything that implies actual fun and/or money might exchange hands, but culturally stimulating and educational, and those two should never overlap?

In summation: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

If anyone's interested, the author of that piece tried to defend his essay in a thread on LibraryThing. He didn't do very well. http://www.librarything.com/topic/229934

What a load of utter bollocks. Seriously. It's like a Daily Mail journalist swallowed a thesaurus then puked it up all over the page. It's the same old "PC gone mad" rant, just with longer words and longer sentences.

Also, last time I checked, young people read lots of books (fiction and non-fiction) written for adults. I'm struggling to keep my 10 yr old daughter away from my Stephen Kings.

If I succeed in my efforts to conquer the world, I will ban most editorials on YA lit. Because most of them, the extent of the editorialist's research involved going to the nearest Barnes & Noble and scanning the YA shelf, then making generalities from there, without bothering to read any YA books published in the last ten years, talk to any fans of the genre, or :gasp: writers currently working in the genre.

Given that school seems to do everything in its power to make kids hate reading*, I generally clench my teeth whenever someone chews out kids for enjoying what they consider to be "inferior literature." Even if you think Twilight is the worst (for the record, I don't like it), get the kid reading! Get them enjoying a book and thinking, "Y'know, maybe reading isn't a horrible chore forced upon me by the adults," and from there, you can steer them towards better books.

*They seem to do okay in elementary school where they're all "Reading is Fun" and don't criticize you to much for what you read; they're just happy that you're reading. They may try to steer you towards better books, but they don't pressure you too much. But once you enter Middle School...it's a mindset akin to drug dealers, where once they've got someone hooked, they start cutting the product with something cheaper. Instead of "Reading is fun," they bury kids in Required Reading that's dense and impossible to understand/enjoy, endlessly quiz them on the symbolism of every element, and of course, can't let the kids have anything with a happy ending. True Art is Depressing as Hell; if you feel uplifted and happy after reading a book, it is shallow and therefore, not True Art.

neandermagnon said:

Also, last time I checked, young people read lots of books (fiction and non-fiction) written for adults. I'm struggling to keep my 10 yr old daughter away from my Stephen Kings.

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To be fair about this point and only this one, the lack of truly in-depth non-fiction aimed at kids is an issue. I love my adult oriented book on King Tut that I got as a kid, but I only got it because the kid ones weren't comprehensive enough and I couldn't find one on Hatshepsut. And I haven't noticed much of a change in that in the last 15 years. I would personally like to see both types of childrens non-fic become possible.

Lillith1991 said:

To be fair about this point and only this one, the lack of truly in-depth non-fiction aimed at kids is an issue. I love my adult oriented book on King Tut that I got as a kid, but I only got it because the kid ones weren't comprehensive enough and I couldn't find one on Hatshepsut. And I haven't noticed much of a change in that in the last 15 years. I would personally like to see both types of childrens non-fic become possible.

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Do you have Horrible Histories and Horrible Science on the other side of the pond? They're probably the most popular children's non-fiction series over here, aimed at age about 8-13. They're pretty in-depth. They're full of humour and proudly leave in the gory bits but they do go into a lot of historical detail as well and include stuff that often gets left out, even of books aimed at adults.

I don't think my daughter's got the Horrible Histories book on the Egyptians but I'm pretty sure there is one (maybe even two or three) because they cover a huge range of historical and prehistorical periods. There's a series on CBBC (children's BBC) that's based on the books.

http://horrible-histories.co.uk/beastly-bookshop

Horrible science and horrible geography: http://horrible-histories.co.uk/more-horrible-stuff

There's only so much that non-fiction books can cover though. If kids are that obsessed with a subject (I was one such kid*!) then there will always come a point where they're going to have to start going to start reading general/adult non-fiction. And there comes a point where general non-fiction isn't enough and you start having to track down journal articles and other university library resources. The more narrow the field, the less likely there is to be a popular book written on it.

*and one such adult

Also, non-fiction is in competition with Wikipedia and other online resources. Kids need to learn to use these (simple English Wikipedia is a good place to start as long as kids understand that Wikipedia can be unreliable sometimes (an important life lesson: don't trust everything you read, double check facts, etc)) but I think from a publishing point of view, non-fiction is kind of up against it.

neandermagnon said:

Do you have Horrible Histories and Horrible Science on the other side of the pond? They're probably the most popular children's non-fiction series over here, aimed at age about 8-13. They're pretty in-depth. They're full of humour and proudly leave in the gory bits but they do go into a lot of historical detail as well and include stuff that often gets left out, even of books aimed at adults.

I don't think my daughter's got the Horrible Histories book on the Egyptians but I'm pretty sure there is one (maybe even two or three) because they cover a huge range of historical and prehistorical periods. There's a series on CBBC (children's BBC) that's based on the books.

http://horrible-histories.co.uk/beastly-bookshop

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Seconding horrible histories. Gruesome facts about the past presented humorously, though they do have catchy songs...

'Stupid death, stupid death,they're funny cos they're true
Stupid death, stupid death, hope next time its not you...'

From what I got out of the article, it doesn't sound to me like he is denouncing YA, but rather pointing out that most YA (or at least mainstream anyway) treats teenagers like they are unintelligent, which, I would have to agree with him on.

Sure, there is a lot really good YA out there, which I don't think he is denying. What he is saying is that that is not the YA that's really selling. Most YA publishers would rather publish books that treat teens like they can't handle the adult world, so they'd rather fill the book shelves with silly crap with cutesy, one dimensional vampire boys and main characters whose biggest conflict is not knowing which boy she wants to date. It's almost like people are afraid to give teens stories with real adult issues and life lessons.

I actually liked this article. I agree with him. When I was going through high school, I was very annoyed by the selection of books I was offered. It was hard to find a book that didn't treat me like I was stupid, and find a book that actually offered me insight of the real world and talked to me like I understood it. I think they fear that teenagers won't like or understand intelligent, real world books, but a lot of them do. And that's not to say that YA can't have fantasy or romantic elements, but rather the way those stories are portrayed. It seems the majority of mainstream YA I pickup has a whiny lead and a one dimensional love interest who exist strictly to remind the main character of how beautiful she is. I can't even finish them. They're horrible.

I get this guy, and I agree with him. Teenagers are a lot smarter than what people give them credit for, and I think publishers need to recognize that and publish more books that are willing to stimulate their minds.

Becca C. said:

It is true that there's a severe lack of good, interesting non-fiction for teens, and what there is that's being published right now consists almost entirely memoirs from YouTubers. Which isn't a bad thing, but yeah, there's not much else. But most teens, if they're looking for books on a certain topic, have no problem picking up an adult book. I worry that if there were a lot more non-fic books aimed at teens, they'd be condescending and light on useful info. Maybe "adult" is a better place for non-fic anyway.

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Yeah. That's a problem. I hate that that is what would likely happen. I didn't have a problem reading really in depth texts as a teen because nonfiction has always been my thing‚ but I did wish there was more of it aimed at me that was just as good as adult stuff. Maybe the solution is to market texts that are likely to do well with both teens and adults to both groups?

Insert the word "comic books" where this author references "YA fiction," and this could be an article from the mid-twentieth century. Insert the name of a different popular genre (romance, SF, fantasy, spy thrillers, horror etc.) and it could be an article from the late 20th century. There was a time when some considered novels themselves to be inferior and mindless entertainment.

https://books.google.com/books?id=c...els were considered an inferior genre&f=false

Literary haters are going to hate, and they'll always pick on whatever is currently enjoying a surge in popularity with the young or with women or with any other group said critic considers silly and impressionable.

I don't usually read these types of articles, as, generally speaking, if you've read one you've read them all; but, this one has been passed around my social media circles for a bit and curiosity got the better of me. There are so many things to take issue with: the assumption of intent, the Father Knows Best attitude, and, frankly, the poor writing of the article itself (but that seems low hanging fruit).

What strikes me is the hypocrisy from the writer. That and his openly mocking the way YA is diversifying, which has nothing to do with his argument. The assumption of inferior intellect by choosing YA over "classics," and veiling that disdain for what sells as concern that teens aren't being treated as adults is just - what?? Symbolism isn't only applicable to "classics," and not reading "classics" doesn't make one illiterate. Why insult teens' intelligence and then defend them?

As a former AP English student, I've read a lot of that literature I'm supposed to have "inherited." Lots of them were boring and superfluous, and I'm not sure slogging through 19th century prose for four years is incredibly necessary when there are YA books appealing to teens that employ the same sort of symbolism, just around a different kind of character. There's also the bit where students are expected to interpret symbols the Right Way over broad interpretation and consideration, which typically means teachers (or exam boards) don't have to expand their horizons and can easily mark wrong answers on weekly quizzes.

Having worked in school libraries in the past, I know how important YA is to teens. It's fun, it's funny, the characters are actual teenagers, and teen problems (dating, anxiety, grades, friendship, etc.) are treated as important things. Teens are treated as important and they don't have to hurry into adulthood to have a modicum of respect. You can take a series like The Hunger Games and argue it's just a love story dressed up, but you can't discount the symbolism of Rue, or the berries, or the consequences of choosing one boy over the other. You can take Harry Potter and argue it's just another fantasy story about saving the world, but you can't deny the importance of balancing friendships while struggling in school, or that Harry, Dumbledore, and Snape are different shades of morality during war. There's even symbolism in Twilight, despite its pitfalls. I mean, the Dystopian genre in YA has its own symbolical importance within contemporary context, despite the saturation of the market.

I also have very little confidence in this man as a teacher or an author, or any kind of expert on YA literature. He seems very out of touch. Regardless of how one feels about places like Tumblr, it's incredibly easy to find well written posts, by teenagers, on the symbolism and merit of all sorts of media, including YA books, comics, television, and pop culture in general.

I can agree there is little non-fiction targeted to the YA audience. In personal experience, however, much of the adult non-fiction I've picked up has been incredibly dry, or is just as sparsely important as Mr. Nutt sees YA fiction.

Even worse was what he said in his LibraryThing post--that teens don't need "safe places" in their reading. I wanted to beat him over the head with a Laurie Halse Anderson hardcover.

The hate YA lit gets, just seems to serve as another example as to how despite spending so much time marketing to teens and obsessing over them, our culture just really hates them, just seems to have contempt for their experiences and their ideas, and what they're going through. It's a painful part of life and most the adults, with the exception of YA lit, spends time belittling and making light of the pain teenagers go through. I can remember hearing so many variations on, "You're a kid. What do you have to be upset about?" Ignoring, of course, the fact that there is plenty of misery inherent to being a teenager. Heck, the "Is YA too dark?" question always struck me as kind of quaint, because Misery has never respected a "You Must Be This Tall to Ride" line; plenty of kids deal with some horrible stuff, before they're old enough to even drive, and I don't think banning fictionalized portrayals of it, is the key to solving it.

Of course, if being a teenager is generally horrible in this culture, it's arguably worse for girls, because now they've got to deal with institutionalized sexism in addition to all this BS. All the while, codgers shriek in your ear about how, "These are the best years of your life."

And I've talked enough. I'll end my post by quoting a YA author I really like, Laurie Halse Anderson. I love, love the hell out of this quote, because it is so true.

I grew up as a teenager with parents who were disconnected from me for their own reasons, so I remember so clearly that confusion and that sorrow. I could go on for days about our disrespect and disregard for adolescence in American culture. Americans are all about loving kids when they’re small and portable, but for some reason … boy, do we abandon our teens. We abandon them in families, we abandon them as a culture, we don’t do a great job in most high schools of educating them properly. We disrespect them, and at the time when they are in most need of good, fun, loving, trustworthy relationships with good adults, we step away. And that’s really stupid and awful. So I try to write stories that tell the truth about hard things because kids need to know it; the world is hard and it will kick your ass if you’re not careful.

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