What I read

In some of these other rather editorial posts, I've talked about where I get my books and why I read in the first place.  I've been thinking lately about why I read what I read.  As I write reviews, I tag each post with genre labels, which pop up in the label cloud over on the right there.  Go ahead, take a look.  The size of each word corresponds to how many posts I've tagged with that particular label, so it's become abundantly clear where my reading has taken me of late: young adult fiction.

Part of the reason so many of these books are for young adults relates to why I began this project in the first place.  This has a bit of back-story, so bear with me for a sentence or four.  My mother is a high school English teacher, and a rather spectacular one at that.  You don't even have to take my word for it; she was voted Best English Teacher of 2012-13 by the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, an award also recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English (you can read all about it over here).  Ah, but I digress.  As part of her inventive English teaching methodology, she wrote and received a very large grant to build a classroom library full of high interest books for young adults.  Soon, Amazon.com was receiving thousands of dollars in orders from her and the library began to grow.  But here's the catch, which is also where I come in.  She doesn't put books into her classroom library that she hasn't read or knows nothing about.  This isn't to censor the content; she feels, as I do, that students should read what they like to read as often as possible, regardless of her own opinion on the book.  Rather, she likes to know what's in the library so that when a student comes to her and says, "I just finished Peeps by Scott Westerfeld and thought it was terrific.  Have you got anything else like it?" she can reply, "Well, if you'd like another take on vampires, try Robin McKinley's Sunshine, or maybe some nonfiction about disease, like The Great Influenza by John M. Barry."  It's not quite feasible to ask one person to read an entire library, however.  Though it was indeed a terrible burden to be asked to dive into boxes of books, brimming like treasure chests filled with jewel-like paperbacks and glossy new hardcovers, and to read whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted...well, I figured I could grit my teeth and deal with it.  You know, for the good of the cause.  The guest room in my parents house became a bibliophile's dream: stacks of books knee high, teetering in towers across the floor because the wall of shelves simply couldn't hold them all, books waiting for their sign-out cards, books in heaps labeled Read and Unread, books in no particular order at all.  It smelled like a book shop, dry and papery with a sharp undercurrent of ink.  I started reading, and then I started writing.

So there's a long-winded explanation as to why I've read so much young adult fiction, though in truth there's a shorter one.  Here it is.  I like it.  The market for YA Fiction is huge and growing, despite claims that "kids these days" don't read.  Authors in this genre are wildly inventive and delightfully subversive, and while books geared toward older readers can certainly have these qualities as well, I find they often don't push the boundaries in quite the same way.  Young adult readers are considered more willing to suspend their disbelief at fantastical scenarios, so whether it's taking a flying car to Hogwarts or the actions of a teenage sleuth, nothing seems to go too far for these readers.  Psychologically speaking, teens and young adults feel things a little more vividly.  There's more black and white and less grey; the stakes are always a little higher.  This translates in both the writing and the actions of the characters in this genre.

Frankly, this is what I like about reading.  I like to find stories that take me to places I will never be able to see, and that paint these places in vivid technicolor.  I'd like to live dangerously, but as I'm far too timid, I'll settle for the vicarious experience of reading about daring characters.  I want to see characters who will risk it all and who struggle with good and evil without the shades of grey that cloud reality.  Maybe it's a search for simpler answers, even if they aren't easy answers.  Maybe it's because I never gave up on fairy tales or finding hidden worlds behind everyday doors.  Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I find a lot of what I'm looking for in young adult fiction, and I know I'm not alone.

I don't think there's any shame in reading.  Not at all.  Not "guilty pleasure" romance novels.  Not slick-fiction sci-fi.  Not fan fiction.  Not made from television serial books.  There's no shame in "jumping on the bandwagon" and reading a runaway bestseller.  There's no shame in finding solace in Shakespeare.  And there's certainly no shame in 30-somethings, 40-somethings, or any-somethings reading young adult fiction.  Readers should never feel as if they have to justify their taste in stories.  Will others disagree?  Of course.  But that doesn't make any of what we read less right for us.  And with any luck, the disagreement will spark interesting conversation and still more stories.

In short, I read what I like, and I think you should to, whatever it is.  Hopefully whatever it is includes this blog.  Happy reading!