Ooo - I’m going to buy some Moomintroll for my sister for Christmas!
OP - yeah I read juvenile fiction. I read all sorts of stuff. Life’s too short to get hung up on labels.
Whales On Stilts!, by M.T. Anderson, simultaneously a tribute to and spoof of juvenile literature. It’s one of my favorite books ever.
I am a librarian at a middle school. My favorite YA reads this year have been The Maze Runner(Dashner), Going Bovine (Bray), and Life as We Knew it(Pfeffer).
I’m finding much of the “YA” labeled stuff is too sexy/violent/explicit lately and I’ve been unable to buy some books that were just too much. Will Grayson Will Grayson is an example. Great book, but not appropriate for middle school. Going Bovine is teeting on the edge of okay. I only let a few select 8th graders check it out.
Fifth graders will tattle to their parents about “OMG! This book has a BAD word!”. By 8th grade, the kids are a lot more circumspect.
I love a LOT of YA books, but I hated “Going Bovine”. would have thrown across the room, but it was a library book.
Maze Runner really intrigued - would like to see a discussion of it here on the dope. The sequel was tiring, didn’t quite live up to promise of Maze Runner.
I’m reading Death Cure right now! 
There is really kind of a split now between older and younger YA. I’ll let my 11yo read some of the younger YA stuff with no problem, but plenty of the ‘older’ stuff would be far too mature for her. If you’re in a middle school library, I can see where you have to distinguish between them!
Well, I just got my hands on hundreds of comics from the early seventies, mostly horror and ghost and junk… I read a few random issues here and there.
Any fans of the genre and era that want to pay for shipping can have them. Otherwise they get donated.
I read Life as We Knew It in the middle of the end of October blackout here in Connecticut. That was very eerie, as I’m huddling by the fire, cooking sweet potatoes in the embers and not knowing when the power would go on!
slight hijack - lightlystarched, a librarian doper, wrote a few posts back - " I only let a few select 8th graders check it out." - referring to a mature YA book. I don’t understand this. I work (as a lowly aide/page) in a high school, middle school, and a public library (yep, 3). Once a book is on the shelves, anyone can check it out! I’d be incensed at a librarian censoring what I or my child can check out! If it’s not appropriate for all the kids in the school, don’t buy it for the school. Leave it for the public libraries to buy.
:dubious: How do you decide which ones, and what do you tell the ones whom you’ve decided shouldn’t read it, if they want to?
Yeah, I had the same thought. What right does the school librarian have to pick and choose who can and can’t check out a book? I thought they had to follow any rules the school has (kids in Grade X or lower can’t check it out, or a kid must have parental permission to check it out) but do they really have discretion on their own? If I were a parent of a kid at that school, I’d be pissed. Like my own parents, I would allow any hypothetical kid of mine to read anything he/she damn well pleased (with the obvious exception of porn, but you don’t find that in school libraries, I hope). No librarian is going to censor their reading choices.
I’ve recently discovered the works of Philip Reeve, and I’m devouring all of them. As others have said, a lot of “young adult” literature is flatly better than your typical novel aimed at adults, particularly in the fields of science fiction and fantasy.
(Bolding mine.)
I would argue that if we’re going by that standard, then ALL kid-lit is “for all ages.”
And yes, I do. I work in a “kid-friendly” museum, and there will often be picture books and other kid’s books on the shelves in the corner of the exhibits. The books of course fit the theme of that particular gallery (so if it’s the paleontology gallery, the books will be about dinosaurs and stuff). I read those all the time because hell, some of them are just FUNNY. One of the galleries has a Jon Scieszka/Lane Smith book called Squids Will Be Squids, and I just about busted a gut laughing.
We have some corny ones, too, but I read them anyway, because it’s books, and I’m not picky.
My school is 5th through 8th. Anything labeled YA in Follett’s Titlewave has a YA sticker on the spine and can only be checked out by 7th & 8th graders. I have a love/hate view of this policy, because it puts some great books out of the hands of younger kids. Like “Hunger Games”. It is a YA book, but definitely could be enjoyed by some 5th and 6th graders. On the other hand, it makes the 5th and 6th graders search out other books and not just gravitate to the YA stickers. Its like a whole new library for them once they are 7th graders.
Some books have been donated to the library, or I have purchased them and have come to realize they are too mature for most students (and to be honest, it is not the students that can’t handle it, it is their parents). These books are not in the library catalog, and I loan them to the students that I know individually. These are the kids that are in here every week, like to talk books, and I know can handle the content.
Ah, I see. You sound like a cool librarian–I wish they’d had one like that at my school (though I don’t recall ever having any limits placed on what I could check out, so maybe that’s a newer thing or a community thing.) Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble, though? I could imagine a kid taking home one of these “special” books, having a parent ask about it, and telling them, “Oh, that’s one of the books that Librarian **Lightlystarched **only lets certain people borrow.” I’d be worried about parents flipping their shit over something like that and having it come back to bite me.
Good for you, though, for exposing kids to more things to read!
I have had parents complain. Funnily enough, the complaints are always about the non-YA books. A fifth grade parent thought The View from Saturday was bad because it has the word “ass” in it. another parent didn’t like Which Witch because of the occult aspect. I just internally roll my eyes.
Like I said, I am very careful about who borrows certain books. Lots of times I know their parents personally and know they won’t care. And by 8th grade, the parents seem to be less hyper-vigilant. I’ve never had an 8th grade parent say anything. If it happens, I’ll deal with it then.
Oh god. I was given (by an adult family or near-family member) a copy of Clan of the Cavebear when I was in 7th grade. I read it. Then my mom either read it or talked to somebody about it, found out it had a rape scene in it, and took the book away from me. After I’d already read it. As if that does anything. Whatever.
I somehow acquired a copy of The Exorcist when I was a little dude. I liked to read, so I read the book. I remember thinking, “no freaking way should I be reading this book!!”
I read Discworld stuff aimed at the younger readers, because I’ll read any D.W. stuff, but otherwise no.
Some weirdo put The Female Eunuch, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four on our bookshelf in grades seven and eight. Not really age-appropriate. I read them, thinking, "What the hell?
I like YA. I’ve re-read the Anne series and the Little House series over and over. I started reading Garth Nix when I was in my mid-twenties, on a friend’s recommendation. I occasionally re-read the Little Women books, although I generally want to throw things at the characters. Has anyone else read David Almond’s Skellig? It’s excellent. And Tom’s Mdnight Garden is good, too.
I actually read both of those on the advice of Nick Hornby, in his Believer column. He was thrilled to discover how good YA fiction was, and that it was in general neither boring nor self-important.
We had *Flowers for Algernon *on our bookshelf in my combination fourth/fifth/sixth grade class (I was in the GATE program, and my classroom and one other that were divided by a sliding blackboard wall shared our own rather extensive library in addition to the one for the school in general). I loved that book from the first time I read it. I’m wondering if it might not have been an alternate version, though, because I don’t remember there being any sex scenes in it.