The unmitigated awfulness of young adult literature

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<<<RANT WARNING. . .RANT APPROACHES. . .RANT WARNING. . .>>>

I just came from the bookstore. Sweet Neptune does YA literature suck.

First there are the 21st century teen social novels, puff pieces about someone's untrustworthy peers or earnest quest for a boyfriend. They fancy themselves funny. They are in fact incredibly dull, with no themes, no context, no real purpose in this world. Maybe NTs find them entertaining, but I don't care.

Then come the R-rated versions of the above, the equally shallow books about the messes Poor Little Rich Girls get themselves into, your Gossip Girls, your Au Pairs, your It-Girls, your materialist trash that shamelessly propagates itself throughout the bookstore, creating identical spin-offs of itself like some deadly bacteria.

At last, in one's fruitless search for substance, one begins to dilate upon the "problem novels". Problem novels seem to think that tackling an issue makes them incredibly profound and meaningful. Death, divorce, poverty, rape, bullying gone too far, pregnancy, drug abuse, self-mutilation, gang violence, racism, child abuse, homosexuality and associated shame, murder, mental illness. . . it's an all-you-can-eat buffet of trauma. Yet it just comes off as lugubrious and heavy-handed most of the time. Dostoevsky wrote about horrible things, but not everyone that writes about horrible things is a Dostoevsky. It also peeves me that in all that diversity of pain not one problem novel has been written about autism. It's like we don't exist.

And teen fantasy! Don't get me STARTED on the bucket of chum that is Eragon!

Me + =

Who's with me?!

That's kinda like how I feel about a lot of modern music.

So why do you even read YA literature? I agree, it never interested me at all. A lot of kids really enjoy it because it is kinda mindlessly funny and doesn't require much thinking on their part. Go read "1984" or "Animal Farm" or something else with substance.

It may be broader than just young adult literature, generally publishing has exploded in all fields (compared to say 40 years ago) so there is just so much rubbish published in all fields it becomes unwieldy. Finding a good book is like finding a needle in a haystack. I think you come across them by accident.

You think YOU have it bad? We were FORCED to read this kind of books in school. and here is the punchline in DANISH!
Now I don't know why danish books of this kind is worse than english ones... they just are.
It is sooo sad when you have finished a book and maintains that it would have been better, had the main characters died halfway through the first chapter.
I once read a book of this sort last chapter first, then second chapter and so on, just to have a LITTLE fun while doing so.
Rant rant rant... I am SO with you MissPickwickian!

When I was a teenager I wrote a screenplay that basically was an Asperger's syndrome problem film. I only write short stories and screenplays.

It's about a few young men with Asperger's syndrome who never meet. It tells the tales of them in a series of short vignettes. It draws parallels between their unfortunate experiences raising the argument that people with Asperger's syndrome are discriminated against, although in a subtle and sly way, by the rest of society.

It also includes sections relating to the treatment of people with mental illness and the thin line between diagnosing mental illness for someone's benefit and it being used as an authoritarian mind control measure. It has a strong existential slant too of course: much like Nausea by Sartre, The Catcher in the Rye or Catch 22.

It has a bit of 1984 thrown into the mix with paranoia or perhaps justified concern about the spread of surveillance cameras in the UK. Also a mild sprinkling of Aldoux Huxley's Brave New World in that characters in the film in some ways bring about their demise by an availability of too much pleasure by being distracted by the chaos, corruption and violence surrounding them by temptations like drugs and pornography.

The trouble is this kind of story has been done many times. Just like any kind. Are there any original ideas left? All that's unique about my film I suppose is that it possibly mixes more of these topics than any other has just because it features Asperger's syndrome.

I think you're being overly harsh.

I see kids reading more than I have ever seen since my childhood in the 60's.
We used to love going to the library back then.... my sister, and friends and I.

My daughter reads a wide variety spanning from those 'rich girls' books, to classics by E.B.White, to Eragon and Harry Potter, Science Fiction and Mystery.

The content is important... at times... but it isn't everything. Reading any of these types of books allows the mind to work anticipating what might happen next... could this really happen in real life... language usage by different cultures/societies, etc.

It's an experience and it all depends on what the reader makes of it.
To say that books should only be written ala Thoreau, L'Engle, Poe, Alcott, London... is to create a narrowly defined experience.
To me, that is not a good way to appreciate literature.

In my mind, it would be similar to saying your child is not allowed to play with certain kids because their language is terrible, and the games they play do not strive for a certain goal such as increasing accuracy, developing fine motor skills, etc.
The child would miss out on the diversity of experience available to them which could help them learn to be better at discriminating between things positive for them and those that are not.

Literature is the same way. I believe my daughter gains practical experiences from reading things I do not find appealing.
She is free to explore YA literature no matter the theme, because I trust that she can understand what is real and what is fiction.
She can appreciate the small bit of truth in all those characters because she seems some of that in the people she meets and deals with every day.

Besides... this argument cycles around with each generation. Same thing with music. The grownups always know best and the kids waste too much time on things the adults now see as worthless.
It never ends.....

You ought to check out books by Laurence Yep. Excellent writer.

Well they're a step up from the books we read in sixth grade. Honestly, "A Christmas Carol" with all the hard words taken out. Give me a break.
My favorite young adult book is "Speak."

Meh, used to like it, now I'm not too fond.
I relate better to adults than to people my own age, so I'd prefer if the characters were older that the ones you find in these kinds of books.

I'm 19 and a writer myself, so I'll occasionally read some of the more well-known YA books to familiarize myself with how to write for a specific audience. [Not that I would ever write specifically YA books per se...I just use the books to obtain stylistic tips.]

I hate chick-lit--even adult chick-lit.

Oh....and I have a passionate hatred for that piece of "sh*terature" known as "Twilight". Stephanie Meyer is a lousy author. She doesn't even deserve to call herself an author, for that matter...she's a pulp writer. Her plots are convoluted, her characters contrived, and her use of language unexceptional. I hate it when girls--even my college friends--obsess over that glittery-skinned, blood-sucking pedophile Edward Cullen. It's perfectly okay to love fictional characters, but for heaven's sake, love quality ones!

I've read Libba Bray's "A Great and Terrible Beauty" recently, and that wasn't much better. It would make a good movie, but the descriptions in the book were waaaaaaay too ambiguous for my taste.




EDIT: The only YA books I actually like are Louise Rennison's "Georgia Nicolson" diaries. They are hilarious...and useful places to indulge my slang addiction.

I like the Tom Swift series, but that is young adult (and quite hokey) sci-fi, but the first 80s release is a human colony built on the reverse gravity similar to Halo.

I would say, that 90% est of Young adult literature is more than likely, NOT written by young adults. Hence Irony.