YA Reading ... and Reading ... and Reading

Sixteen years ago next week, apparently, was the debut of the first book in the Harry Potter series.  I remember the first time I heard of it, from a friend of mine with an advanced degree and a penchant for guilty pleasures in the Melrose Place, Buffy, and - obviously - Potter vein.  I remember, too, hearing Diane Sawyer tell the world that reading was in again thanks to the boy wizard.  The book was a phenomenon many of its target audience may not now remember, nor have comprehended at the time.

I remember, more than anything else, being a bit bewildered as to why what I categorized in my mind as a "children's book" (the label YA was not yet the hot trend it's been ever since; many of us were barely aware that such a genre/category as "young adult" lit existed) was such a sensation.  Having had it recommended to me was a little bemusing as well; there's really nothing in my character that points to much interest in preteen boys' adventures in magic-land.  I wasn't offended, merely perplexed at the idea.

It's not something one discusses these days, YA having become the market maker that it is ... but I've never "gotten" why it has come to dominate the market as it now does.  Intellectually, sure, I can easily see that YA is easy reading, and the genre is well suited to the trends of urban fantasy and the genres selling the most right now.  Its accessibility is key, and I've also been told by more than one person that it's nice to get a break from sex in books.

This last bit perplexes me, too, admittedly.

After the death of Parke Godwin this week, I spent a little while after work today perusing his works at Amazon (it's an easy tool, even if Amazon is a terrifying market behemoth) and then took a look at Donald Harington as well.  What struck me was that, in Harington's reviews in particular, the negatives had a very strong tendency to judge his books badly because of the sex.

Harington takes hillbilly stereotypes and turns them into storytelling and characters.  So one finds an awful lot of incest - consensual and non - a good deal of very youthful canoodling, and not an incidental amount of rape.  Of course (and there's a whole screed in this problem, but I will leave it unsaid for now) rape scenes are called "sex" scenes by reviewers nursed on our seriously deranged culture.

But what interested me is how viscerally people were responding to the sex.

When Fifty Shades is the other bestseller of the moment (and is written, as far as I can tell, with a good deal *less* sophistication than the YA series leading the rest of the market these days).

We have ... an interesting interplay, in the US market anyway, right now where Terrifying yet Titillating sex is concerned.  People seem to hate it, react against it powerfully, find an entire book ruined by it - when it's rarely the whole point.  And then books whose whole points *are* the sex scenes (again, I've never heard anyone accusing the Fifties of being good literature) sell like steaming hotcakes all over the place.


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NPR, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

The upshot of all this is that even the adult novels selling right now seem to have become less sophisticated.

Which actually brings me (you thought this was post enough? I'm just getting started) to the thesis of this post, which is that readership nationally has devolved.  In schools, "the classics" (again, deconstructing this is another post, but don't take it as read I think this generic label is necessarily a be-all) have steadily given ground for about 25 years to more accessible, and less complex, reading.

As with everything else we do these days, Americans don't go in much for balance in the written word.  There is a quote in the NPR story linked here:  "Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.'"

Now, most of us know that all of the latter genres mentioned as likable are represented in some of the most sophisticated echelons of our literary heritage.  But the current market has a tendency to gravitate to these genres in YA, and the market has for all of the sixteen years since Potter been stalking YA properties for the Next Big Potter (or Twilight, or Hunger Games, and so on).

In a sense ... the bestseller lists are not much about readers and books, but about product and profit.  We all know this, too, but we don't think a lot about its ramifications.  And the YA-ification of our reading habits is beginning to tell on us, apparently.

I may not be able to lead a literature symposium, but I can at least, thanks to the education I was fortunate to partake of, competently participate in a discussion of Hemingway, Shakespeare, the greater themes and plots through the history of literature, and even manage to avoid appearing an utter dunderhead when it comes to literature beyond (gasp) those Great Classics of Western lit.  I have a little exposure to ancient storytelling beyond my heritage, I have enormous respect for Asian storytelling I adore but would be terrified to try to actually take on.  I can function intellectually precisely because, while we did get to read "accessible" literature when I was young (which I think is an extremely good thing) it was often in the form of a kind of dessert, toward the end of a term or a school year, when we'd been working pretty hard on the sorts of reading which presents greater challenges.

Reading is entertainment, but its value as a literal exercise, a mental challenge, seems to have gone out of vogue.

Again, I have been biting my lip for the past decade and a half - and particularly since trying to make an "author platform" out of this blog - about what I must admit to be a contrarianism about YA.  It isn't politic, if one wants to be a published author (even if not in the Hot Genre du jour) to go around dissing what *is* hot.  It isn't clever to sneer at what's popular, nor at particular authors/works, either.  And it isn't smart to go to a cocktail party and give everybody the finger.  What if I queried an agent who loves YA but also does happen to do straight historical fiction?

It also just isn't nice to be nasty about something just because you don't get it, and don't want to.  Okay, I can't find any part of myself that can understand the fascination for a kid in a magic school.  (Yes, I know that is incredibly reductive - our first impulses on buying/reading anything tend to be so.)  I also don't begrudge my PhD pal for loving the kid, nor anyone else out of the millions of readers.  Reading is entertainment.

I just wonder whether this sixteen year trend will ever turn again.  I'm old enough to be skeptical any market maker is forever.

Whatever the trends - and I don't think I ever will write to them - books like The Ax and the Vase still have a place.  They have, as long as literature and publishing have been in anything like the forms we recognize today, since Walter Scott's romantic adventures in historical fiction, and there are plentiful authors keeping histfic not merely alive, but fascinating.  To intellectually mature readers of whatever age.

The fantasy I have about Ax's "place" in this world remains the same.  It is:  on that shelf at some old relative's house, where a kid, thirty years from now, is going to find it and pull it down, some boring summer day.  And they will love it for the rest of their life.


I've been that kid.  I know that kid's still alive.  I know that kid doesn't need to be talked down to, that the story of Clovis will be enough.

I can't wait for that kid to stumble across him, and dog-ear him to death, till something is on fire inside.