Yah Yah I Read YA Books. Doesn't Everyone?

I'm going to take a break from "serious writing" for a moment here...

In today's Digital Reader there's an "editorial" by Mike Cane about YA books: Snooty Snobs Should Shut Up. Heh heh. It's a rebuttal against an article about how adults shouldn't be reading YA books, or at least why they should be embarrassed to do so.

I beg to differ. I read lots of YA books, and even Y books, because... Well... they can be imaginative and fun and even serious. And usually not boring, and almost never pretentious. (To find out more about pretentious literature, try A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.) Just because a book is labelled YA, or even a children's book, doesn't mean it contains only puerile themes and gaga-goo-goo language, or heaping shovels full of canned boredom like so much capital-Literature. And you know... It's OK for adults to think about, and read about, kid stuff. (Even if some adults naïvely seem to believe that kids never think about "adult stuff" and nobody under eighteen has ever read Fanny Hill.)

Good work can also sometimes hang out in more than one tent. For example, go read Fly by Night and tell me it's not a serious, adult book about freedom of the press and censorship. Oh, wait, it's a YA title and the protagonist is a child. (FBN is also better than its sequel, by the way.)

Growing up as a boy, I missed lots of great "girlie books" so I started cranking through some of those in my thirties. So what? I'm not embarrassed about that.

And if this book-talk is all boring, try popping over to Dear Prudence: Help! I discovered my teen daughter using a hand mixer—on herself. Yeah. Kids never think about adult stuff.

I admire YA authors, actually, and I envy their restraint. Every time I try to write something suitable for the under-30 crowd, or especially the under-18 crowd, I still end up with sex, drugs and grand opera... So even starting with youthful protagonists, I simply cannot write a suitable book for children.

And just to be clear: I'm way out of the loop here under my rock, so I don't really know what they're talking about. I just wanted to rant for ten minutes while taking a break from watching Sanguinity Hematode wrestle with her current train-wreck.