“Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived.”
----Margaret A. Edwards
I certainly believe in the inspiring words of Margaret A. Edwards, whose candor reflection about Young Adult genre's benefits is very clear. Now I'm not a teenager then why should I involve myself in reading the most-loved genre books. I'm a grown-up, or rather say an adult who can take her own decisions and moreover, have a mind of her own, then why do I need to read YA?
Now there's a great debate that whether or not an adult should YA literature. So, I, being a 23-year old working woman, like to jot down the reasons of why I should never be ashamed of reading YA and mostly, why I love reading them.
1. Shame?! I don't understand that why an adult with a sense of his/her own mind should be ashamed of reading YA. No body should be made to feel ashamed of their reading choices and secondly YA fiction are all coming-of-age-stories that are told in a first-person narrative.
2. Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, etc these author's made their name after writing some of the world's best children stories which will forever stay with us and which have no particular age to be read by a human being.
3. It's always fun to learn about new things, YA is an ever-growing and constantly developing genre and especially it is the genre which runs parallely with the latest inventions, technology, issues, stigma etc. So in a way, they can enlighten a human mind, be it teenager or an adult.
4. “Calling a book "Young Adult" is just a fancy way of saying the book is censored. People used to say they like to read books about romance, true crime, comedy, horror or science fiction. But these days people simply say they like to read "Young Adult" books. As if that were a topic. But that's the thing: Young Adult is not a topic, it's a level of censorship. Saying "I like Young Adult books" is just another way of saying "I like books that have been dumbed down for children. I like books with no big words and no difficult abstract concepts. Nothing that will strain my brain." People like to brag that they used to start reading at an early age, as if that were a badge of honor, a sign of intelligence. Nobody brags about when they started to watch TV. But books are being dumbed down so much these days, it's really not a sign of great intelligence when you're a grown up and you struggle your way through Green Eggs and Ham.”
----Oliver Markus
Oliver Markus is a German author who wrote books like Sex and Crime: My Strange Journey, The Book of Uncensored Quotes by Celebrity. Now we should never judge a writer by the types of books he reads, but in this case, I think otherwise.
Keeping in mind about his level of censorship idea, I would like to say that adult fiction has always and forever been categorized as something very easy, commercial or contemporary and something as difficult and complicated. But here's the best thing about YA, they are never categorized, moreover, they are a perfect blend of being easy and being difficult which balances it out and the readers are bound to feel light-hearted and inspired.
5. Teenage period is the most vulnerable and fragile period of one's life. In this ever-growing world, it is hard to compare the issues once faced by you as a teenager and a teenager facing them today. So YA books help in that department to let us see through a teenager's mindset. PS, if you're a parent, then you must read them to get a feeling what your child goes through in his/her social and personal worlds.
6. The YA market is growing like anything, and on that note, more and more authors are opting to write a YA story, not because it is the most-widely read genre, but mostly because YA stories are appealing to a 16-year old teenager as well as to a 34-year old man.
7. "You call it predictable, I call it enriching!"
Well yeah of course, you're an adult, YA books will be totally predictable for you, since you have been there, they why should one read it? Like I said, our mindset and choices change with time, hence we as adults need to look down upon our younger selves as to see how we would have reacted if something like that would have happened to us now, and for that one must read YA as much as possible.
8. We should never stop learning. YA teaches us a hell lot of things from parents drama to relationship troubles to a world where we need to contain our peace with some decorum and by forming few groups. I love YA because it helps me to enlighten me about the survival strategy one must apply in a difficult time period. Yes, adult fiction do teaches us that, but YA gives us a clear perspective about it.
9. YA proves to be a great means of escape for me. Be it fantasy or a paranormal or a dystopian or a realistic YA, they always prove to be a way to the world where hope and belief are the only two main things to survive, and I really like it how the authors flawlessly incorporate that idea unlike adult fiction.
10. Don't be delusional that YA books don't have a multilayer plot or complex characterization, I'm reading quite a lot of YA these days and some of them are so twisted layered with so many issues and filled with so many three dimensional characters, that it started to make me feel that YA is actually better than adult fiction.
And to end on that note, I must suggest you that read whatever you want and love to read and don't ever follow the prejudices and the trends blindly.
Here are the list of few books that I read this year and I believe that any adult will love reading them:
The Gracekeepers by Kristy Logan
Making Pretty by Corey Ann Haydu
Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos
Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schneider
Nowhere But Here (Thunder Road, #1) by Katie McGarry
Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy #1) by Kerstin Gier
We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach
All the Rage by Courtney Summers
Under a Painted Sky by Stacy Lee
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Go ahead, grab a copy of any of these incredibly awesome YA and watch yourself losing in the aura and the charm of young adult worlds.
Happy "YA" Reading!
I love this post. I'm 27 and I still read YA, and I have no intention of stopping. My personal belief on the matter is read what you love. Anything seems possible in YA books. I feel like there's a sense of wonder and adventure missing from adult books, that YA books have in abundance.
ReplyDeleteMaterial Girls and Fangirl are two of my favorites, so I'm glad to see that you liked them too. I'm still a teenager, but I definitely plan to continue reading YA for the rest of my life. There's just something different about it compared to adult books.
ReplyDeleteKrystianna @ Downright Dystopian
People of any age are allowed to read YA and should read YA. I really think it's not about who reads the genre, as long as people are reading it! I know I will love YA when I'm much much older, and that's totally fine by me! Also I think any Rainbow Rowell book is for adults :D
ReplyDeleteAlex @ The Book's Buzz
Thanks a lot folks for your lovely comments! :-)
ReplyDeleteSome really great pointers here! I don't think anyone should ever feel ashamed of reading Young Adult. A lot of people say it is too simple and meaningless but I feel like if you do go look for it, and sometimes when you don't you'll find a lot of moral messages addressed in there as well!
ReplyDeleteThank you Olivia! :-)
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