YA Wednesday: Not Just for Teens
More YA books challenged...
In Illinois, parents tried to get Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian pulled from the required summer reading list at Antioch Community High School.
From a parent: "If there were just swear words, I could deal with that. But sections of this book are just vulgar."
(Daily Herald)
But they failed. One of the parents, like other grown-ups involved with recent Gossip Girl controversies, suggested warning labels. Bookshelves of doom responds:
Would Lord of the Flies and Hamlet and American Psycho and The Hunger Games get slapped with one that reads VIOLENCE INSIDE? For that matter, would American Psycho get the SEX sticker, too? Jeepers. Some books would be so plastered with stickers that we wouldn't be able to see the cover art anymore. Who would decide how much 'offensive' content was enough to warrant a label? ETC. [Moments later: Actually, I may have to reconsider my previous opinion. Because a CAUTION: DOG DEATH sticker would come in way handy in some cases. Or maybe something a little more broad, like DANGER: MAY CAUSE UNCONTROLLABLE SOBBING.]
Who's really reading YA?
Joanne at Tomorrow Museum speculates that YA books sales are up because teens enjoy the immersive and solitary experience of reading.
Paul at Futurismic redirects:
This is a mantra we heard over and over again during the massive YA genre fiction circle-jerk last year, and it’s always backed with the unvoiced assumption that only Young Adults read YA. I’ve worked in a library, and I can assure you that’s an observable falsehood; most genuinely popular YA is successful precisely because so many adult readers with an expendable income enjoy the same titles.(via Read Roger)
Quick links...
The New York Times reports on the growing disconnect between teenagers and Holden Caulfield:
Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”John Green responds: "It's not Holden's fault if people read him poorly."
Melissa Marr closes her "first adult deal," by which we mean non-YA book deal. Graveminder is described as "Six Feet Under laced with ancient Irish evil and a dash of Faulkner." (Publisher's Weekly).
Susan Beth Pfeffer announces that This World We Live In, her third post-moon-crash apocalypse book following the fabulous Life as We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone is coming out April 1, 2010.
Happy reading.--Heidi
FredTownWard on June 25, 2009 at 04:10 AM
Once again parents are complaining about the inappropriateness of a book assigned as REQUIRED reading for their children, and once again government-appointed (or self-appointed) "defenders of reading" are making light of their concerns and insulting their (and our) intelligence.
Just because a book is intended for children, even won multiple awards saying same, doesn't mean that it is appropriate for children. In particular it doesn't mean that it is appropriate to assign for required reading.
Once upon a time educators and librarians understood that, took seriously their responsibility as gatekeepers to choose carefully among the avalanche of books intended for children. They didn't always choose well or wisely, of course, but the sincerity of their efforts was appreciated, especially in comparison to their counterparts of today who loudly denounce censorship of any kind...
while stripping books with favorable views of Christianity, patriotism, capitalism, dead white Europeans, etc., from their collections wherever possible.
Here's a clue for the professionally clueless: graphic depictions of sex, whether with hands, animals, or other people, are going to result in parental complaints. Is the literary "masterpiece" which contains them that you intend to foist upon your students really so good, so important that it is worth stirring up all this ill will, worth convincing parents who hadn't had reason to think that much about it that book banning is a good idea?
At least as long as arrogant idiots like you are in charge of their children's reading assignments?
cables on September 16, 2009 at 09:01 PM
Seriously! There are tens of thousands of YA readers -- that doesn't make you qualified for an ARC. You have to earn them with good performance and a knowledge of the genre.Anyone who thinks that only children and teenagers can read books about teenagers and kids is missing out on classics such as Gone With The Wind (Scarlett is a teenager for a good potion of the book), Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, Alice In Wonderland, and most of the works of Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl. Are these books only for children? To suggest so would be ludicrous!