It's All About The Story

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Oh, swell. Just what we need: Another journalist talking out of his ass about YA fiction.

Call me crazy, but I'd say the reason different books appeal to different people isn't the people's age, it's that they're different people. There's no dichotomy between What Kids Like and What Grownups Like, like some sad Venn diagram without even its edges touching. There's no reason to assume that something adults like is automatically Not For Kids.

Kois is right about one thing: as an adult I don't respond to The Giver. And I didn't when I was ten, either. I've enjoyed crazy fantasies and space adventures--including the ones Kois maintains are Only For Adults*--since learning how to read. I'd go into the adult fiction section at the library and grab a bunch of paperbacks, then move on to YA and juvie fiction and grab a bunch more. Still do. My taste--my sense of what makes a good story--has remained remarkably consistent over the years.

On the other hand, I know people who loved The Giver when they were kids--and still do almost twenty years later.

So maybe it's not so much about your age. Maybe it's your individual taste. And maybe it's totally possible to make a book that appeals to kids and adults, so that the Venn diagram overlaps. And maybe--just maybe--that's why the books in both circles are so darn popular.

Protip: Aside from dismissing all the kids and grownups who don't fit into your Taste Somehow Does A One-Eighty In Your Late Teens theory, maybe it's a good idea if the title of your article doesn't insult, y'know, every children's author ever. Except Lois, I guess.

Special Note To Lois Lowry: My terribly belated condolences.


*Weirdly enough, when I was a kid I used to wonder what magical point in my life would change me so I liked boring grownup books. I couldn't imagine why I'd change, but most people seemed to imply that action and adventure were For Kids. So it's doubly strange that this article relegates the kinds of books where things actually happen to the adult world. Usually it's the other way around.

Comments

[marag.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. Did I mention yes?

I dislike most dystopian fiction. This doesn't mean I think it's bad, it just doesn't appeal to me personally. Plenty of adults and teens I know love those books.

This means...that we have different tastes in books. Why is this such a difficult concept??

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I do wonder what people SEE in some of the books that don't appeal to me, but that's mostly just, y'know, CUZ. But I can see why it's difficult to separate the bad from the Just Not My Thing--if something is really popular and you dislike it, it's tempting to just say it's bad. I've got to remind myself not to do that.

Until I find out it really IS stupid. Then it's open season.

Yes, and....

[redbird]

There are books I didn't like (or didn't really get) as a teen, and do now; there are books I liked when I was 30 and don't now in my late 40s. Some of it is that people change, yes—so part of the question is the degree to which those changes are common, even usual.

(Sometimes it's the cultural context that changes, what Jo Walton calls the Suck Fairy going back and putting sexism or racism in books one loved twenty years ago. That, I think, is less universal: some people will read right past those things again 20 years ago, or (alas) will share the attitudes I now find obnoxious and therefore not be bothered if the writer or characters show them.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Good point. I do appreciate some different things now. Age can be an influence--but it isn't the only influence. And the suggestion that ANYTHING a grownup likes must not be for kids is patently ridiculous.

God damn that Suck Fairy. Sometimes I can override the suck, sometimes I can just recognize it as part of the author's mindset and treat it as a study in anthropology (there is one series that was written over four decades, and it's terribly entertaining to watch the author realize he'd forgotten that women existed and try to fit them into a universe that he literally built them out of), and sometimes I have to throw a book on the floor and stomp on it a few times just to get my feelings out. Sometimes I do all those things at once.

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

There are some Golden Age of SF books that I simply can't get through, even by heavily preparing myself with all sorts of "They were a product of their times", etc. I've tried on at least four occasions to read the Lensman books and I just want to throw them against a wall or rinse my brain out or something.

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

I posted a reference to that same idea below - when you go back to a book you loved when you were younger (and in a different world, or maybe a less critical reader) and discover that the Suck Fairy, or the Racism Fairy has been at them when you were not looking...

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. One of the first big books I read (in 2nd grade) was The Lord of The Rings, and over 20 years later, I'm still mostly reading Fantasy and Sci Fi Adventure stuff with lots of action.

Some things have changed. Good characterization and character interaction is much more important to me now than the actual action*, and I rather like a well handled** romance as long as it's part of something else rather than the whole point of the book.

But by and large, I still like much the same types of books, and many of the exact same books not only still have a place on my shelves, but come off those shelves and get re-read on a regular basis.

*This has knocked rather a lot of "golden age" Sci Fi off the list. Some great guys when it comes to exploring ideas, but many couldn't write a compelling character or engaging interaction to save their lives.

**I've recently run across a few others who can do this well, but for a while, that basically meant "written by Lois McMaster Bujold" ;)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, some things have definitely changed--I give out more points now for technical merit and, as you say, characterization and interaction.

On the other hand, I just mentioned further up the page that one Golden Age series I really enjoy, partly BECAUSE of its failure, is the Sector General series by James White. The dialogue is stilted (and in some cases literally COPIED AND PASTED from one story to the next), the stories are formulaic, the characters are dull. It's almost so bad it's good--but he has some geniunely fun ideas, like all his weird aliens, and a pacifist approach to sci-fi. The funniest thing, though, is charting his treatment of women over the four decades he wrote these stories. He establishes early on that women in this universe--all women, from all species of aliens--CANNOT be interstellar doctors, due to their brains somehow rejecting the Science Fiction Educator Tapes required to learn to be one. So they get to be nurses. Then, as the series progresses, you get the sense that one too many women complained. To his credit, he takes it to heart, and struggles to find things for them to do--the one female character he names starts as a nurse and becomes a pathologist. But it's clearly foreign to him, and he still forgets that women exist--or reverts to treating them like hysterical females. It's ... kind of an amazing arc.

... ANYWAY, what was I talking about? OH YES, some of the stuff I notice in stories has changed, but I still like the same stories. I just have more things to pay attention to now.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to check out the Sector General stuff for a while. Keep forgetting, tho.

That arc does sound kind of hilarious, and I find it interesting that none of the other people who've recommended the series to me (all men) have said anything about it.

I should also clarify that it's not so much that I dislike Niven and Heinlein and all these days as that I just often find them kind of boring. Unengaging, perhaps.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing is that you can tell that it just doesn't OCCUR to him that women exist, except as sexy props. When he starts trying to fix that, he really works to find a place for his female lead Pamela Murchison--and yet you rarely meet another professional or Monitor who isn't an Irish man or an alien.

I've been interested in the role of women in Golden Age sci-fi for some time. Maybe I'm just more attuned to it.

And that's fair enough--I haven't read Heinlein (SCANDALOUS, I know), but I know how it is when you just don't respond to something.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Over the last few years, I've really been making an effort to be more aware of the presentation of gender* roles and issues, as much as anything just trying to make explicit all that's implicit in the back of my head. I'm fairly certain that the gender issues in Sector General simply didn't make any impression at all, one way or another, on the acquaintances who have recommended the series to me without mentioning it, in the same way you describe White not noticing it until it was brought up.

The one thing from Heinlein that I would recommend everyone read is the Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long. It's a couple of chapters from Time Enough For Love, but they've been pulled out and published as their own thing. No plot, no cohesion, just a bunch of random musings on all kinds of things, none more than a couple sentences before he goes on to something entirely different. Pretty interesting, and there's a lot of fun stuff in there. The source of a couple of my favorite quotes from anywhere, too.

Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land are good too, but I would only recommend reading them as a pair. They're both exploring such opposite extremes that just reading one or the other often gives a very skewed view of Heinlein, and it's only when reading them together that you can really get that he doesn't necessarily see all this as the one true way to go, he's just playing around with ideas and taking them to extremes so they show up more clearly. Hardly "must reads", tho.

*And to a lesser extent race, but since I have a lot more female friends than non-white friends, the gender issues come up more often in my personal experience, and thus get more attention.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I thought Starship Troopers was enjoyable (shame about the movie). Still haven't gotten around to Stranger though.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Stranger is...interesting. It's been long enough since I read it that I can't really remember how to describe it, except as a great contrast to Starship Troopers. I should pull it out again one of these days.

And yeah, it's a damn shame about the movie. Not only did we not get cool power armour, but they completely missed the entire point of the book :P

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Some great guys when it comes to exploring ideas, but many couldn't write a compelling character or engaging interaction to save their lives.

That's pretty much what I think about H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. And it's why I prefer Dick's short stories to his novels: you can get in, get the wild ontological riff, and get out without having to slog through his inability to write engaging characters (though I have to say Ubik was a lot of fun, and The Cosmic Puppets was pretty good even though it had one really skeevy part that made me wonder things about PKD, but The Man In The High Castle is supposed to be an alt-history classic and I found it totally unreadable).

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft works for me, I think largely because I'm the right kind of bookish shut-in to actually identify with his one Character ;) I also do like his rather overblown writing style.

PKD, tho, yeah. I much prefer the shorts where he just twists your mind in a knot in about 5-10 pages to his novels. I do want to read A Scanner Darkly again, tho, some time when I'm not quite such a wreck as I was the first time. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, all I really liked was the world-building, the stuff about Mercerization and the mood control panels and the animals and such.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

I would sometimes get people who knew me as a kid coming into my booth at the fair and saying things like, 'i figured you would have grown out of this fantasy stuff.' and you know, I think that a) they didn't realize how insulting that might sound, b) they were actually kind of envious.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

See, that's the weird thing about this. I felt sorry for grownups because they didn't seem to be ALLOWED to read fun stuff. I swore that I would do it anyway, even if that made me a bad grownup.

But really, that's TOTALLY insulting. I guess they just don't hear themselves? Or maybe they're just bitter that they won't let themselves enjoy what they actually like.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

I agree with all you said there. I did the same thing: went to the adult section as soon as I'd gone through all the YA Heinlein books etc. I was still in elementary school when I did that. And, while I have gained a taste for non-action books as I've aged, I still love mad adventure stories, the madder the better.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

Hell, right now my favorite trilogy is still by a YA author: The "Paranormalcy" trilogy by Kiersten White. She writes a realistic teenage protagonist so well that my thirty-something self and all my other age selves enjoyed it immensely in every way. Like, it was really hard to find major flaws in regards to the But This Is Just For Teens thing.
Richelle Mead and CC Hunter do the same thing for me.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

See, I can't stand books about relationship bullshit and whiny people with whiny people problems--and how much of adult fiction is that?* I like my fiction to make me love the world it's from, and that doesn't. I also can't stand mysteries or people musing for pages about their crappy pasts and how it bothers them so (QQ) and they'll never find joy (Q_Q). Part of the reason I like YA fic is it skips a lot of that--and also has the benefit of books that are not always White People centered.


* If it's not Fifty Shades of Bad Sex right now. Ugh, I've done better smut that's actually, you know, RACK and SCC.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I do think YA is a lot more minority- (and female-!)friendly, yes.

I am no good with existential angst. WAAH IT IS SO HARD TO BE A MIDDLE CLASS WHITE PERSON IN A SUIT yeah yeah tragic. But then, I'm no good with most contemporary fiction. I want something new and different when I read. I've already got contemporary America.

NSFW;

(cli-TOR-isssss!)

[daiq.livejournal.com]

My mum wrote to the school librarian when i was in year 1 so that i could borrow from the upper primary section of the library :D (We have Infants from Kinder to Year 2, and then Primary from Year 3-6 in our Primary (Elementary) schools). We got to do the same turn around when i went to high school in Year 7 when i tried to check out The Handmaids Tale in about week 4 of the year (once i realised why the Librarian was having a conniption about my borrowing habits, i went searching for the stuff with sex). And what do i buy/borrow now (as then) Sci Fi and Fantasy and what i call Boys Adventure Novels - Clive Cussler, Will Adams, Matthew Reilly and the like, not Tom Clancy though, he doesn't have enough Adventure!

I totally blame The Hobbit!

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

I recall a recent blog entry I read about The Suck Fairy.,...

The Suck Fairy sneaks into some of the books that you loved as a child or a young adult, and slowly seeps out the magic and the things that you loved about it. Some books are more resistant to this, but it is very common to go back to your shelves and re-read a book you remember loving as a kid and find that the Suck Fairy (Or her companions The Sexism Fairy, the Racism Fairy, and all of their kin) have been at it while you weren't looking. Things you never picked up on because of all the shiny are suddenly staring out at you, and it can be a very uncomfortable experience...