Kiddie Lit

There are several categories of fiction, distinguished mostly by their audiences' ages and reading levels.  Roughly, they amount to these:

        1) Picture books, to be studied by and read to small children,
        2) Early reader books for slightly older children
        3) Early chapter books aimed at the 7- to 11-year-old crowd,
        4) Young adult books for readers between 12 and 17 and
        5) Grown-up books.

Category No. 4, Young Adult (YA,) has exploded in the last 15 years.


YA Blockbusters

The books that seem to have kicked off the YA explosion were the Harry Potter series.   The first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was released in 1998 in the U.S. (1997 in Britain.) Parents probably read the first book aloud to younger children, who read later installments to themselves.  Parents, by then taken with the series, read the books as well.

It was inevitable that such creative stories -- that sold in the tens of millions -- would be made into movies.  The Harry Potter empire now includes seven books, eight movies and a theme park.




Other authors noticed and started cranking out other appealing YA titles.  Some examples:

In 2005, the first book in the Twilight series -- a vampire-themed suspenseful romance novel -- was released and was followed by three other Twilight titles.  By the end of 2011, more than 120 million copies had been sold, and the first three books spent 143 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Again sensing an audience, film producers turned those books into a series of successful films.

Also in 2005, a German author released The Book Thief, a serious YA title about the Holocaust set in Germany during World War II, that was on the best-seller list well into 2012.  It was turned into a play and then a movie.











In 2008 came The Hunger Games, a YA trilogy that by 2012 had sold more books on Amazon than even the phenomenally popular Harry Potter series.  Again, the stories were made into movies, also very popular.






Adults and YA Books

In September 2012, Bowker Market Research reported that more than half the readers of Young Adult books were over the age of 18, with the greatest number of those aged 30 to 44.

There has been much hand-wringing over this, and I understand it in a way.  I have read some of the above titles and enjoyed them.  They are not going to make a serious reader forget Tolstoy or George Eliot or Philip Roth, but they seem to be good stories, mostly well-told and not too demanding of the reader.

It strikes me that such straightforward books are more easily adapted into films than literature with layers of nuance and distinctive writing styles that cannot be conveyed easily on the screen.  

These books are also, like virtually every YA book, coming-of-age stories.  Everybody has memories of growing up and can identify with a story about a teenager's struggle to grow into an adult self.  Once we're grown, we split off in various directions, and so the adult experience is less universal.

In fact, many adults now admit cheerfully that their favorite books are young adult novels. This may not be a good sign.  It may mean that we are unwilling to grapple with serious ideas.

Or maybe preferences in storytelling have moved on, just as audiences for opera have winnowed and newer, simpler music forms like rap and pop have become more popular.

My guess is that, as people do more reading of shorter pieces on the internet, they become impatient with any writing that does not come directly to the point.  How many times have you heard or said the phrase, "Give me the executive summary," in recent years?


Teen Read Week

An organization called YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) holds its annual celebration, Teen Read Week, during the third week of October -- next week, this year -- to promote teenage reading.

This is all well and good, but I'm a serious reader.  Given the popularity of YA titles, I'd like the librarians to organize an ALSA and an Adult Read Week to promote actual literature too.