I’m a book snob.
I’m not proud of it, but I judge non-readers pretty harshly. There are people out there who say things like “I don’t read”, and they don’t seem to think that it’s a serious hole in their lives, which I cannot grok.
Books are, for me, a necessity. Since the day I was able to read Grover At The Farm all by myself, I have been reading. I have a quick link to my library’s website on my Firefox toolbar, and I choose new purses based primarily on their size, because they must have enough space for an average hardcover. I have read hundreds of books, from classics to “chick lit” to non-fiction on almost any topic, and I’ve got a “to-read” shelf (currently growing online at Goodreads.com) that never seems to get any shorter. I deeply regret that I only have one lifetime during which to read, because I’ll never be able to read everything I want to.
I think more people should be regular readers. The digital world is slowly chipping away at our attention spans and encouraging us to absorb written words in small, manageable paragraphs, instead of pages and chapters, so I smile when I see people at bus stops or in coffee shops, holding an open book. So why, then, do I feel such hostility towards adult readers of tween-and-teen-targeted “literature”? See, right there, I used sarcastiquotes without even thinking about it. I get all sorts of annoyed when I see a grown person paging through Twilight. Why would anyone other than a 12-year-old girl voluntarily read about angsty sparkling vampires (unless they’re the parents of teens and tweens who want to be familiar with what their kids are reading)? My parents weren’t standing in line at the store, waiting excitedly for the next Babysitters Club book to be released so they could discuss it with their friends at work, so what changed over the past 20 years? Did young adult (YA) literature get more complex and adult along the way, blurring the lines?
It sounds sort of rhetorical, but it’s a question I’m honestly asking of the Dope: has there been a shift in the complexity of YA books over the years, making them closer to adult books?
I’ve done a lot of thinking about my hostility towards the YA stuff. My conclusion is that there are so many wonderful books out there that I want to share with people, and when I get “Hunger Games” as a response when I ask what someone’s reading, I automatically file the person under “doesn’t actually like to read”, and I put away the recommendations I was going to share with them. Someone reading “kids’ books” isn’t going to want to read Asimov, or John Irving, or a history of the life of Henrietta Lacks, right?
The more I think about it, the more I think it’s not necessarily a hostility against YA in particular, but against bullshit fluff literature, against people who choose to read badly-written junk when there are so many other options. But then again, I’ll admit to having enjoyed the Harry Potter series, and if I’m being honest, I have to say they were better written than Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” stuff, which was aimed at adult readers. So where’s the line? What’s a “good” YA novel and what’s a “fluffy” grownup novel?
Do most readers of YA or otherwise fluffy literature stick to those genres or do they dabble in all sorts of books? I tend to classify these readers right next to the non-readers, but maybe my perception is off.
Why should it matter? It’s not my business what people read, and on a conscious level I know that, but I see someone on the bus reading Fifty Shades of Grey and I die a little inside. I’m sure there are folks who will look down on my collection of science fiction and medical memoirs and declare that I’m not a real reader if I don’t know Tolstoy and Dumas by heart, and I’m just passing on the scorn to people who read fluffier literature than I do. Is that just human nature?
I’d like this to open up into a discussion, if anyone’s game. I need help pinning down what it is that bugs me about YA and fluff, because otherwise I don’t see how I will ever change that prejudice.
